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?

Anonymous polls are indeed useless for several reasons.

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”.

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.

On launch Steam Deck had it’s desktop/Plasma session set to X11, hence my question

A method that attempts to collect data from a randomized or representative population rather than relying on self-report.

What way do you imagine would be more precise?

Unavoidable analytics, apparently. Yay?

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.

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.

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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.

if the graph is really at 0%, and not 0.0001%, why’s it there at all?

also, i’m really confused as to why an HTML webui would qualify as a display server.

And in my case, I kinda don’t like Endeavour OS. I installed it on my laptop to try it out a couple months ago. It looked to me like a convenient no nonsense installer for Arch with some nice defaults, then you stumble on their custom update/mirror manager nonsense. Then you want to use a printer and realize they left CUPS disabled, as if to give you an “excuse” to use systemctl. Then if you want to use Samba, you need to go out of your way to find a default config file. I’ve had to jump through more hoops and dealt with more quirky nonsense than with Manjaro stable on that distro.

It’s like it doesn’t know who this is meant for. People who want their hand held through a GUI for something basic as updating their system, or people who love writing their own config file for everything.

Might as well install Arch, really.

-Other happy Manjaro user

Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m biased against it, thanks to my experience with it.

Well, I can take solace in the fact that 99.9% of the packages you are using are in EndeavourOS too. So, I was mostly right. :)

Yeah, also I think EndeavourOS and Arch moved to Plasma 6 at around the same time too? I tried holding off the update to Plasma 6 for a few days but finally took the update on March 12.

I also wish we could replace Manjaro with a green themed EndeavourOS. Manjaro is the next biggest Linux honeypot after OpenOffice.

I think with enough faffing around customizing things in KDE Plasma, I think a green-themed EndeavourOS is doable. Would I recommend it? Not really, lol! From what I’ve seen, I‌ like EndeavourOS’ default theming.

It’s just a shame EndeavourOS isn’t as known as Manjaro (at least during the time I first jumped into running Linux as a daily driver). But then again, with Manjaro shitting the bed becoming more known, I‌ hope EndeavorOS can take the place of Manjaro as the Arch-based distro for newbies.

Converting Manjaro to Arch in place is a labour of love. I have done it myself and it is was more steps than I expected it to be. Worth it though. Good friend.

Oh yeah, I was there with him when he was doing it. I can’t do any help other than cheering him on, and to have another eye on the screen making sure he doesn’t make any stupid mistakes in the process. At few points, I reminded him of the fact that I’ve backed up my files, and if things really get FUBAR, we can just do a clean install and restore the files from backup.

If Manjaro doesn’t work for you, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for everybody

Leave our sacred amazing green Manjaro alone!

EndeavourOS is crap btw

And LibreOffice has terrible UI, even if it’s feature-rich. Onlyoffice is the way to go

Alright, enough unpopular opinions for today.

Trying to set up snapshots is what broke my system. Not sure what the issue was exactly, but BTRFS was reporting a different amount of used space than there actually was, and my snapshots started recursively backing up until everything died

Next time I install Linux I’m going to use Ext4 and snapshots out the gate

Yes, “just buy new hardware” is not a solution.

But dont let some news fool ya. NVIDIA already won the AI race, so their “new open source driver” will only benefit their newly sold products

Thanks for the link :)