Source: https://linux-hardware.org/?view=os_display_server
Reporting is done by users who voluntarily upload their system specs via
# hw-probe -all -upload
Reporting is done by users who voluntarily upload their system specs via
# hw-probe -all -uploadSo not skewed at all…
Do you have a better way of measuring it?
In what direction would voluntary self-reporting of all system specs skew the display server statistic (and why)?Do you have a better way of measuring it?
No better way of measuring doesn’t mean this is a good way of measuring.
What way do you imagine would be more precise?
What way do you imagine would be more precise?
Unavoidable analytics, apparently. Yay?
I like the way kde does it. On first install it gives a slider with how much analytics you want to send. I just do all of it because I trust KDE, but it’s nice that it asks you. They probably have some pretty good data.
Well do you want useful stats or not /s
But seriously, a lot of opt-in (that never get opted in to) data is insanely useful for developers, but it has such a bad stigma that we never get anywhere close to the amount of usefulness a larger dataset could provide.
Tbf a lot of that stigma has to do with trust violation.
A method that attempts to collect data from a randomized or representative population rather than relying on self-report.
Yeah, this is pretty textbook selection bias.
The fact that you need consent to get this data would make a randomized approach impossible.
Could always go for opt-out instead opt-in metrics. Fedora had some recent controversy with it.
deleted by creator
Yes. It just may be possible that accurate poll data on such things isn’t possible.
Steam hardware survey but that will skew towards gamers. That said, it would be a good indicator on how compatible Wayland is.
I imagine people who care about this sort of thing are more likely to report it. And people who care about this sort of thing are also more likely to be early adopters and go through the effort of switching to Wayland.
The way to get a more random sample is not something I want (built-in, automatic telemetry by default). So I’m fine with having skewed data for something like this.
Its a pretty good survey and has a good sample size. Statistics is hard. I won’t take the criticism too seriously.
err, why? actually it can be skewed against wayland(wayland users tend to be more security aware), and why the suprise, KDE, GNOME are wayland from the get go, steam deck too, hyprland and sway etc
It can skew either way equally. We’re just left to do armchair psychology about the type of people who would submit data to this site. So the numbers are effectively useless.
You’re discounting the trend here. Assuming the methodology is consistent, over a short time we’re seeing a noticeable change, bias or not.
I’m not actually. Does anybody doubt that wayland use is increasing? Distros have increasingly been making it the default. I’d be surprised if use weren’t increasing. In fact it might be under-represented in this data depending on whether all distros are being accurately represented or not.
But the change in the numbers is not useless since the psychology of the Wayland users vs. x11 didn’t change
That seems probable but was there any doubt that Wayland use is increasing? Wayland has been changing to the default distro by distro. The only reason this is “news” is because somebody has claimed that “Wayland usage has overtaken X11”.
Wait Steam Deck now runs Desktop mode in Wayland?
plasma do, unless valve changed that
On launch Steam Deck had it’s desktop/Plasma session set to X11, hence my question
Why would it be skewed? What would be the cause for a subset of linux users, that upload hardware probes with extraneous information about their display server, to skew the extraneous data?
by default, your content is all rights reserved, the most restrictive license possible. AI trains on “all rights reserved” content all the time. You really think adding a CC-BY-NC is gonna do anything?
Because a huge portion of the people willing to do this are already on Wayland, but I believe there exists an even larger percentage on X that are not submitting any data.
And another commenter said:
We’re just left to do armchair psychology about the type of people who would submit data to this site. So the numbers are effectively useless.
Because a huge portion of the people willing to do this are already on Wayland, but I believe there exists an even larger percentage on X that are not submitting any data.
What is the basis for that assumption?
And another commenter said:
We’re just left to do armchair psychology about the type of people who would submit data to this site. So the numbers are effectively useless.
So because one cannot know which type of people submit data to the site it should be disregarded? That’s basically saying any poll or questionnaire with anonymous yet unique answers are invalid. That’s a pretty bad argument.
Anonymous polls are indeed useless for several reasons.
Man I spent 4 paragraphs saying what you just said in one sentence. 😅
So because one cannot know which type of people submit data to the site it should be disregarded? That’s basically saying any poll or questionnaire with anonymous yet unique answers are invalid. That’s a pretty bad argument.
This is basically a survey or poll. You want people to provide you with data about what they’re running. To get an accurate view of the entire population you need a representative and randomized sample. If you’re relying entirely on self-reported data you’re not going to be getting a reliably randomized subset of people. You’ll get people who are motivated to report their usage to a third party. That can lead to persistent biases in the data.
It may be that Wayland use is being under represented because the people reporting want to show that “X11 is still king!” Or it could be that this website is shared frequently with certain user groups (e.g. in some arch (btw) forum or something) and so you’re getting a skew towards that population and away from the whole.
We don’t know who these users are and we can’t “offset” for those factors. And the data isn’t reliably randomized so it’s subject to those biases whether we know about them or not.
Though as another person pointed out the trend itself may be of some interest if the population being polled is consistent. Though I doubt anybody suspected that Wayland use is NOT increasing?
Here’s a smaller sample size (2417 people at the time of writing) but all you need to do is fill in your details on the website: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics/
X is at 66% and Wayland is at 33% for GamingOnLinux.
Wayland has a mouse capture bug in proton / wine. It particularly seems to be an issue in FPS games. That may contributing to slower adoption for Linux gamers.
Works fine here, on mutter with mesa. Looks mostly like a KDE bug.
Speaking of Valve, they probably have numbers for Wayland vs X too, unfortunately they don’t seem to publish this statistic in their survey.
Valve is difficult. On the one hand they have their own Wayland compositor with gamescope. Which works by launching an explicitly configured XWayland session for the game.
And on the other hand there’s Steam, which is still an X application.
And on top of that are stupid Steam Input bugs that only happen when you try to launch a game with gamescope.
On the Steam Deck in gaming mode Gamescope is the main compositor which launches two XWayland sessions. I guess one for Steam and one for the game.
It’s bizarre.
As someone who switched to wayland way back when sway was dominant…? About time.
X11 has been mostly solid for me. Wonder if Wayland would be worth messing with.
To temper your expectations you’ll likely have some problems. But you’ll have the ability in future to make use of new display technologies, like VRR and HDR
Way to go Wayland
I’m sure Nvidia will become stable on wayland by the time xfce also migrates lol
NVIDIA is likely to be stable on Wayland next month. If you wait for other people to ship you code, it will arrive with the fall releases ( eg. Ubuntu 24.10 ).
Xfce is targeting 4.20 for full Wayland support. If you use Xfce 4.20 on kernel 6.9, you may break the Internet.
He said the numbers.
NVIDIA is likely to be stable on Wayland next month.
Do you have a source for that?
Not digging them all up but this is the next article up for me: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-24.1-Released
Don’t let your memes be dreams
Bc if you had meme dreams they would be nightmares?
Pretty much all the Xfce4 apps support Wayland. We just need Xfce4 panel and the desktop.
I’m willing to bet that, like Linux usage statistics, Steam Deck had something to do with this.
Anyway, I wish I could switch to Wayland, but back when I used it it caused a dozen programs I use everyday to get very crashy.
How many Steam deck users are uploading their hardware stats though? This is opt-in reporting.
Doesn’t steam deck use x11?
After doing some sniffing: Yes AND no
The default “gaming mode” that the Deck boots into is running wayland, specifically valve’s own gamescope compositor which has a lot of workarounds and breaks from wayland’s spec to allow for better gaming performance.
When you quit out to “desktop mode” it loads into KDE Plasma with X11, although with recent changes to Plasma, it may well be that the desktop mode will change to being wayland based too.
Pony? Pony.
Sorry I’m a little horse.
You sound a little hoarse
Anyone who needs accessibility is screwed as Wayland takes over. Let’s hope we can still choose for another say 40 years. Then, I’ll be done, and Wayland can rule. Pity those who will still need accessibility options though.
How so?
In X11, any application can control any window. That makes screen readers and other accessibility tools very easy to write.
In Wayland, applications can only control their own stuff (no injecting
sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-rootthrough keystrokes right after you hit enter on asudocommand in your terminal!). Screen recording access is only granted on request. A lot of applications written for the “anything goes, permissions are an illusion” style X11 has, will be difficult to port to Wayland.Windows had a similar problem when Vista introduced integrity levels (even non-admin users can have several levels of privileges, and windows can’t interact with higher privilege levels by default) leading to a lot of these tools running as admin, even under modern Windows.
Wayland and X11 have a more involved accessibility tree, but not every accessibility application uses that, and not every application exposes the necessary info. Synthetic clicks (i.e. interactive screen reader support) support is limited by design, as are global keyboard shortcuts.
Accessibility tools on Linux are already pretty mediocre compared to macOS or iOS or Android or Windows, but on Wayland it’s even worse.
Ah ok. Thank you for the detailed answer.
I really don’t get the whole Wayland vs X11 thing. X11 works fine, why crate an alternative? What’s so great about Wayland that can’t be implemented in X11?
The problem is, X11 doesn’t really work fine for modern usage.
It kinda falls apart with multiple monitors, especially when they require different scaling or refresh rates (or both), HDR support would be incredibly difficult to add, it’s buggy, it’s virtually impossible to maintain or add features. Often fixing a bug breaks things, because the bugs in it are so old that programs have actually been designed around them, or even to utilise them.
Now imagine trying to adapt X for use with VR/AR displays and all the differences in window management that’ll be required for that.
It’s a security nightmare. Any app can see what any other app is doing. That means that if you have a nefarious app, it can scrape any information on your screen, without even needing root privileges. Then there’s a load of other vulnerabilities.
The developers have moved to Wayland because X is structurally unfixable.
Wayland is architexturally better than X11. X11 was developed in a time where any serious application more powerfully than a terminal emulator would be running on another computer, and everything else has been hacked on top of that. There’s hardly any security restrictions for things like keyloggers and key stroke injection. It’s old and maintenance sucks for the people currently maintaining it.
After a couple of decades, people looked at what the rest was doing and thought perhaps the old mainframe model isn’t necessary anymore. Windows and macros don’t model their GUI after mainframes with dumb terminals that happen to be physically located within the same machine, so X stands alone in its design architecture.
I think everyone maintaining graphics code for Linux distros thinks X11 doesn’t cut it anymore. Importantly, the people writing GPU drivers don’t seem to want to be held back by the extensions built on top of X11 (while others dutifully maintain their old drivers). This is work only the companies making GPUs can afford, without it, the drivers will stop working. There’s probably also a reason Android took the Linux kernel but stripped it of X11 acceleration and developed its own GUI stack. Canonical tried to get rid of X years ago by developing Mir and a bunch of small projects tried to create an X12 of sorts, but neither took off. Almost everyone is now working on Wayland when it comes to alternatives.
There are people who don’t care. Some GUIs will always be X11 and they can use X11 as long as the drivers and tooling still support it. Most X11 programs have worked without modification for years through XWayland, and I expect future applications to still work fine through some kind of reverse that’ll turn Wayland programs into X11 programs.
This is exactly the problem I meant. Thank you for such a detailed overview of the issue. Most apps won’t provide for it, and as you described why technically, it will mean the end of accessibility as a system whole.
I doubt it’ll be the end of accessibility. There’s a very active issue on Github about an accessibility portal to fix Wayland’s shortcomings for accessibility. I expect the problem to be that very few people work on accessibility tooling, so even if the standard is finished tomorrow, it can take years for tooling to catch up.
I expect the Gnome/KDE tools to work on Gnome and KDE first, and then generic tools to work later. Or maybe the tooling Google has built into ChromeOS will be ported over, as Chromebooks are running on Wayland as well, who knows!
Luckily, X11 is going nowhere for the coming years. There are still people running system-v on bleeding edge Arch installs. Linux has a very long half time when it comes to software support. If you install Ubuntu 24.04 with X11 today, you’ll be able to keep using the current accessibility toolset until 2034 at least.
GNOME is working on a new Accessibility Toolkit for all desktops, funded by the $1M from STF. It’s intended to make accessibility better on Wayland.
Watch thisweek.gnome.org for updates on accessibility; there’s usually one. Here’s a very recent article about how it’s going from LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/971541/
“At this point, some of you might be thinking ‘show me the code’”, he said. The audience murmured its agreement. Rather than linking to all of the repositories, he provided links to the prototypes for Orca and GTK AccessKit integration. Campbell said these would be the best way to start exploring the stack.
If all goes well, Newton would not merely provide a better version of existing functionality, it would open up new possibilities. Campbell was running out of time, but he quickly described scenarios of allowing accessible remote-desktop sessions even when the remote machine had no assistive technologies running. He also said it might be possible to provide accessible screenshots and screencasts using Newton, because the accessibility trees could just be bundled with the image or pushed along with the screencast.
The conclusion, he said, was that the project could provide “the overhaul that I think that accessibility in free desktop environments has needed for a little while now”. Even more, “we can advance the state-of-the-art not just compared to what we already have in free desktops like GNOME”, but even compared to proprietary platforms.
He gave thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund for funding his work through GNOME, and to the GNOME Foundation for coordinating the work.
There was not much time for questions, but I managed to sneak one in to ask about the timeline for this work to be available to users. Campbell said that he was unsure, but it was unlikely it would be ready in time for GNOME 47 later this year. It might be ready in time for GNOME 48, but “I can’t make any promises”. He pointed out that his current contract ends in June, and plans to make as much progress as possible before it ends. Beyond that, “we’ll see what happens”.
Like a lot of Wayland, accessibility is currently in development while distros are shipping it in production.
I’m sure the accessibility portal will fix the current issues and even improve things, but there’s no guarantee that this will all work in a year’s time. There are still lots of restrictions right now, despite people’s best efforts to fix them in the future.
My understanding is that AccessKit is an entirely separate thing to the portal.
Unfortunately, for several things, your choices are X, which is broken by design and few developers QA their software for anymore, or Wayland, which works pretty well in many areas, but where several important (or even basic) features are quagmired by bike shedding. But things are improving really quickly, and part of that is everyone shifting focus to Wayland.
I recently tried to navigate my GNOME desktop via screen reader and did not enjoy the experience. If I ever need it, I hope it works properly by that point…
At least for me, X is a worse experience on every computer I own (including the NVIDIA one), which is why I use Wayland. Neither is problem-free. I’m fortunate enough not to depend on accessibility features; perhaps my opinion would be different then.
Are you serious? Every sane desktop is working on accessibility. I recently heard from System76 that they’re putting in the effort for COSMIC, we have GNOME focusing a portion of that €1 million they got from Germany, on accessibility (last I heard, they’re working on cross-desktop solutions). Now, I don’t remember hearing much from Plasma on accessibility, but I think it’s fair to assume they’re also working on it.
User skullgiver provides an excellent answer as to why. It’s a shame, but it’s a reality that most apps won’t expose themselves properly, and hence accessibility is over in Wayland. Despite their excellent efforts.
Gotta resoect the tty. Consistently consitent
Not really surprising considering that (IIRC) it’s the default on the Gnome variants of Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora
But keep in mind that voluntary data tends to be pretty skewed
voluntary data tends to be pretty skewed
Yea and a strangely (to me) large proportion of people seem vehemently opposed to apps even asking to collect usage data, which is incredibly helpful for developers, putting aside the more controversial things like privacy/marketing uses of the data.
Personally I don’t believe for one second that Wayland has actually surpassed the install base of X11-like display servers.
Depends on how you measure it. A lot of IoT and wearables run Wayland, for instance (Tizen, Steam Deck, a bunch of specialised IoT stuff). Also don’t forget the millions of Chromebook running Wayland on top of Linux. With my watch, my Deck, and my laptop running Wayland versus my desktop running X11, I live in a Wayland household.
I’m not sure what the general user is running, I would say X11 as well, mostly because a lot of Linux users have Nvidia hardware and Nvidia’s crapper drivers still struggle with Wayland. I think it’ll be a few years before you could say that the majority of people who know what Linux is, are on Wayland
With most of the big distros defaulting to Wayland and NVIDIA finally under control, I expect most new installs will be Wayland ( and stay Wayland ) by the end of the year. So the Linux noon numbers may be 90%. I would be surprised if Wayland does not hit 80% overall by the time we hit 2026.
thats so pog, i wished it actually worked
Which nvidia drivers work with Wayland? I have one pc that only has 470 supported card, l guess all hopes are lost there… But my 980 gtx machine seems to work mostly on wayland, except somehow minecraft only works on Xorg
That’s a good question for Nvidia.
Gtx 470 should work just fine, but 980 will not work because nvidia locked it down.
Yea, it works with 470 using nouveau drivers but the card isn’t as fast as with the proprietary drivers, at least it felt like that for me
I think you need to change pstate in debugfs
Edit: 🥺gifs don’t work?
/sys/kernel/debug/dri/*/pstatehttps://nouveau.freedesktop.org/KernelModuleParameters.html
I had gtx 760 ti(yes, it exists) long time ago. It worked slow until I changed pstate.
🤩I’ll try
I’ve switched to X11 last week, because kwin_wayland crashes each time my monitor enters low-power mode.
Out of curiosity, what GPU do you have?
Intel UHD graphics.
My intel laptop on kde is unreliable, but gnome is super stable.
If you want windows like taskbar, you can turn it on gnome and other features that will make it more like windows.
On desktop with AMD video card I saw no difference between kde and gnome.
I ended up back on gnome. Because it was less distracting. I am a long time gnome user and kde was a curiosity. Latest versions of both (Arch Linux).
Would love to know how you’re dealing with Gnome and HiDPI. I found it really wacky, massive title bars and such. Went to KDE Plasma 6 and it all looks right, but agree it seems a little wonky sometimes. I’m hoping the bugs get ironed out.
Wait, is it on a population of 5000 computers? Bruh, why are we even looking at this?
No the sample size is ~5000, which is pretty OK if representative of the population (big if though)
Given that it requires self-reporting from the command line, I feel like the people that are more likely to be on the cutting edge may be more likely to report as well
Hence the big if
To the contrary, I would expect the sample to skew more towards people who have a heavily customized X session and strong opinions about window managers while drastically underrepresenting average GNOME users who stick with the default Wayland session. Someone who likes their custom setup can still be waiting for a Wayland equivalent while casual Ubuntu users have been defaulted to Wayland on new non-nvidia installs since early 2021.
People who voluntarily report usage are more likely to be new users, experimenting with Linux distributions etc. Greybeards like me will check out new stuff every few months or years, and won’t shout about it one way or another. We’ll probably not send statistics when prompted, either.
This isn’t prompted. To send your data, you have to install a cli tool and run it with 2 specific options.
I don’t think any new users are represented in the sample.That indeed changes things, potentially introducing much more bias. What motivation would somebody have to install this tool and run it? Is it being marketed/advertised somehow? How, where, and to whom? :-P
It collects system info that helps you troubleshoot, or check a computer’s compatibility with Linux.
It offers a switch to upload your anonymized data to the web site where it’s visualized and ordered for better readability, and also entered into the statistical analysis.
I doubt it’s representative of the population. Because it’s from self reporting, at best it’s representative of those who advocate their favourite platform, which is just a particular portion of the population. Though it would be cool to see Wayland surpass X
Waiting for explicit sync support from nvidia but even then, I doubt I’ll switch until I can enable tearing. I’m sensitive to input latency and playing on wayland feels like my aim is floating
