...
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

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.

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

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.

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?

There 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

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.

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

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.

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.

The 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.

The 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.

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...

The desktop mode uses X11 because default-Wayland wasn't yet ready for the version of Plasma used by the desktop session.

The gaming mode uses XWayland rather than Wayland. The gamescope session can't do Wayland applications - it's running all X11 applications, but otherwise wants to be a Wayland compositor.

Switching between the modes is a logout/login into a different session.

But you can also complicate things further by running a nested desktop session within the gaming mode (although that's not default).

I've been using Wine Wayland for some games for a while and it works well.

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.

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.

Well the difference between GPU and monitor upgrades is that newer games will literally not run, or will be annoying and glitchy, in older GPUs. New monitors will make games look better but they already look fine anyway and the games don't push it as a hard requirement.

High refresh rate monitors also requires that you have a high-end machine running games at high frame rates, so on budget systems that upgrade is behind a bottleneck.

And I'd guess people will prioritize other features for non-gaming use (size, resolution, multiple screens) and then it gets even more expensive to upgrade these "gaming perks".

High refresh rate monitors also requires that you have a high-end machine running games at high frame rates, so on budget systems that upgrade is behind a bottleneck..

Not really. They simply give you a wider range and flexibility of monitor's refresh rate adjusting to your framerate. If you have a weaker machine, such monitor will run at lower refresh rate matching the framerate that the game will reach, dynamically adjusting to it.

Plus you'll have the benefit of high refresh rate for non gaming desktop operations, which even weaker machines can normally handle (for example it results in less motion blur when you scroll text or perform any other rapid content movement on the screen).

Basically, there are only upsides and modern high refresh rate displays don't really ad much of cost on top of explicitly trying to get a 60 Hz one. So I still find it strange that people are willing to buy new GPUs more than replacing 60 Hz monitors and attribute it more to lack of understanding of what the difference exactly is.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 August 2024 at 10:45 pm UTC

Yeah it is never a downside, but it is still more expensive than a new 60Hz or 75Hz, and you aren't getting the "full" benefit. I don't think motion blur when scrolling text is a very compelling motivation.

When I got my current monitor, I did look for adaptive sync, which was readily available on cheap models, but going from 75Hz into the 100+ range was a big price increase... Though I also didn't splurge on a GPU (APU all the way, more than enough for me), if I was spending that kind of money I'd probably not go with a monitor this cheap either.

Yeah it is never a downside, but it is still more expensive than a new 60Hz or 75Hz, and you aren't getting the "full" benefit. I don't think motion blur when scrolling text is a very compelling motivation.

Well, you have to use it to compare. I wouldn't want to go back to 60 Hz monitor for any desktop usage. Clearer text movement is compelling enough for me.

And the price difference today is not big. Also, looking at the stats numbers, we are talking about people who are ready to buy GPUs which aren't cheap but aren't ready to buy better monitors. That's what doesn't add up for me.

Last edited by Shmerl on 7 August 2024 at 11:21 pm UTC

Also, looking at the stats numbers, we are talking about people who are ready to buy GPUs which aren't cheap but aren't ready to buy better monitors. That's what doesn't add up for me.

Sample size of 1, but I chose a 4K IPS panel that only went up to 60Hz because color accuracy was more important than anything else to me. The monitor itself is more expensive than every other part of my desktop combined.

And then I went and defaulted to Wayland...sometimes I question my life choices.

I chose a 4K IPS panel that only went up to 60Hz because color accuracy was more important than anything else to me. The monitor itself is more expensive than every other part of my desktop combined.

I found 2560x1440 IPS to be most optimal for the current generation of GPUs as a good compromise between gaming and general usage. 4K just doesn't cut it for gaming unless you start using upscaling which I'm not a fan of.

But 4K IPS would be great for desktop usage though. Stuff like photo editing is probably nice with it.

What I'm waiting for is 2560x1440 IPS Black with high refresh rate. The difference is that it improves contrast ratio over existing leading options like "nano IPS".

See:

* https://tftcentral.co.uk/videos/ips-black-dual-mode-refresh-rates-and-other-new-lcd-panels-for-2024-lg-display-roadmap
* https://displaydaily.com/the-secret-of-ips-black-is-out/

Last edited by Shmerl on 8 August 2024 at 4:38 am UTC

Sample size of 1, but I chose a 4K IPS panel that only went up to 60Hz because color accuracy was more important than anything else to me. The monitor itself is more expensive than every other part of my desktop combined.

For me aspect ratio > colour accuracy > everything else. So I've got the (pretty rare) 2560×1600 monitor with really good colours, which was an upgrade from the (similarly rare) 1920×1200 monitor with really good colours. A different refresh rate isn't even on the radar unless someone makes a 16:10 monitor with really good colours that happens to have a higher refresh rate at the time I happen to need a new monitor. The Deck OLED has a 16:10 display with really good colours with a 90 Hz refresh rate, so that's nice.