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)?
canonical has been doing this for years too, and a significant portion of linux users are on ubuntu. i'm not sure if a good portion of users enable it though.
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.
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.
This is the important point IMHO. This kind of feedback is exactly something I'd love to do, but I don't think I had any idea about it before this post. Just a little popup on a new install/upgrade would be a much broader net.
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.
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.
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.
yep, plasma was still x11 from default when steam deck launched, plasma 6 switched to wayland as default, now i don't know if steam deck was updated to plasma 6
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?
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.
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?
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?