Quoting: Shmerl...
60 Hz / 1080p is a bit more strange. May be upgrade rate has slowed, but better and affordable options are around for years already so something else might be going on. I.e. like less people caring about low latency and better screen sync experience?
...

Aren't monitors generally upgraded far less often than the rest of the system? It seems to me people simply haven't gotten around to upgrading the monitor yet.


Last edited by emphy on 5 August 2024 at 5:16 am UTC

COSMIC almost has as many users as budgie, and COSMIC doesn't get officially released until Thursday.

Quoting: emphyAren't monitors generally upgraded far less often than the rest of the system? It seems to me people simply haven't gotten around to upgrading the monitor yet.

Yes, but it feels like this is way too infrequent even for this kind of upgrade cadence. Besides going from 60 Hz to higher refresh rate with adaptive sync is a huge improvement, so I'd guess gamers would want to do that not any less than getting a recent GPU. Once they get one that's better - then it can be already infrequent for displays.

I think in practice the reason could be that some don't realize / didn't investigate the difference it can make.

Last edited by Shmerl on 5 August 2024 at 11:45 pm UTC

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: emphyAren't monitors generally upgraded far less often than the rest of the system? It seems to me people simply haven't gotten around to upgrading the monitor yet.

Yes, but it feels like this is way too infrequent even for this kind of upgrade cadence. Besides going from 60 Hz to higher refresh rate with adaptive sync is a huge improvement, so I'd guess gamers would want to do that not any less than getting a recent GPU. Once they get one that's better - then it can be already infrequent for displays.

I think in practice the reason could be that some don't realize / didn't investigate the difference it can make.

There aren't any IPS panel monitors over 60Hz and also 4K, so there's that.

The gap between KDE and GNOME is even bigger 1 month later. There are almost twice as many KDE Wayland users (50%) than GNOME Wayland users (34%), though the gap is smaller between X11 desktops (23% vs 36%). But that means half of GOL Wayland users are KDE users! I don't find this surprising at all because it's by far the best Wayland session.

I switched back to GNOME a few weeks ago from KDE. KDE is a better Wayland session, but some things about KDE itself drive me mad, so I went back to GNOME.

36% of desktops are Wayland, while 63% are X11. It will be interesting to see what the stats are come October; the gap has already tightened by 3% since last I looked. There aren't any more showstopper NVIDIA issues with recent GPUs and Wayland, so for general use, there's not much stopping distributions like Ubuntu from defaulting to Wayland and Pop!_OS/Fedora even dropping Xorg.

Notable remaining issues:
1. GNOME's Global Shortcuts are being worked on to get Orca to MVP on Wayland. Very unlikely to land in GNOME 47, but I have hopes for GNOME 48 in April. KDE already supports Global Shortcuts.
2. Color Management & HDR protocol needs client applications to implement a few aspects of the protocol before it can be ACKed. I don't know if anyone is motivated to do this...
3. Commit-Timing and FIFO protocols need to be finished for SDL 3 to default to Wayland.
4. Wine Wayland driver is still experimental and missing a few things. Maybe Wine 10? Wine through Xwayland works fine on KDE.
5. Steam Client needs CEF to have Wayland support: https://github.com/chromiumembedded/cef/issues/2804
6. The Graphics Tablet settings page for KDE is missing a bunch of features compared to X11: https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues#Graphics_Tablet_Support - Joshua Goins has implemented a few of these for 6.2 and I imagine they'll slowly work through them...
7. Discord needs to implement screen sharing so it works on Wayland.
8. Electron needs to default to Wayland so Electron applications use the Wayland backend without messing around with environment variables.
9. Krita needs to port to Wayland after CM is merged...that's likely to take a long time. Xwayland might have color management capabilities in the meantime for SRGB at least (I don't know about CMYK), but the fractional scaling blurriness issue will still be present. Krita can't scale itself on KDE either, so the scaling issue is present on all Wayland desktops.
10. Jetbrains IDEs are finally getting ported to Wayland! Probably in Q4 of 2024! I don't use them, so I don't care, but this is big because Jetbrains has upstreamed all this work for all Java applications so they'll work on Wayland too. This is a remaining issue because it's not finished yet.

All of these issues are a big deal on GNOME when you have fractional scaling enabled because of the blurriness issue, but if you're using KDE with "Let Xwayland applications scale themselves", you don't need to care about half of the issues. Aside from Discord, the rest are rather niche, so for general usage, KDE's Wayland session should work pretty well.

I hope the Color Management protocol is merged this year. Surely Discord will have working screen sharing by then, right?

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThere aren't any IPS panel monitors over 60Hz and also 4K, so there's that.

Looking at the numbers, 4K doesn't seem to be a big factor in being stuck with 60 Hz. I.e. most people are using something like 1920x1080.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 August 2024 at 2:19 pm UTC

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualBut that means half of GOL Wayland users are KDE users! I don't find this surprising at all because it's by far the best Wayland session.

Not in every case, though.

Since the stats are about your main gaming PC, there are definitely some folks like me skewing them, because of the Steam Deck - I'll be showing up as a KDE/Wayland user in the stats, but on all of the machines where I actually get stuff done, I use Linux Mint Xfce Edition/X11.

I doubt there's any way to address that issue, unfortunately.

Last edited by Pengling on 7 August 2024 at 2:41 pm UTC

Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualBut that means half of GOL Wayland users are KDE users! I don't find this surprising at all because it's by far the best Wayland session.

Not in every case, though.

Since the stats are about your main gaming PC, there are definitely some folks like me skewing them, because of the Steam Deck - I'll be showing up as a KDE/Wayland user in the stats, but on all of the machines where I actually get stuff done, I use Linux Mint Xfce Edition/X11.

I doubt there's any way to address that issue, unfortunately.

The Steam Deck uses Wayland? Huh. I thought it was on X11.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThe Steam Deck uses Wayland? Huh. I thought it was on X11.

I had to look it up when I updated my PC info when I got my Deck - my understanding is that in Gaming Mode it's Wayland, but in desktop-mode it's X11, and that's why it takes a few moments to switch between the two.

Anyhow, folks like me are probably just a blip in the stats, but I thought it was worth pointing out.

Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThe Steam Deck uses Wayland? Huh. I thought it was on X11.

I had to look it up when I updated my PC info when I got my Deck - my understanding is that in Gaming Mode it's Wayland, but in desktop-mode it's X11, and that's why it takes a few moments to switch between the two.

Anyhow, folks like me are probably just a blip in the stats, but I thought it was worth pointing out.

You make a good point there. I imagine the Steam Deck users on GOL will increase over time (maybe even outnumber regular distributions like the Steam Survey), but at least for right now, SteamOS only accounts for 5% based on "Main Gaming Machine" and 1.85% based on the distribution being SteamOS...interesting to see those numbers so far apart.

Part of me wonders why Gaming Mode uses Wayland but Desktop Mode uses X11. Wouldn't it be the other way around? I would have thought that was because of Gamescope, but I think you can run Gamescope on X11 anyway...

I guess it'll be a good sign when the Steam Deck switches to Wayland on Desktop Mode, since Valve employees like Joshua Ashton have been famously adamant about producing software that works well above other considerations.