Statcounter, a website that tracks the market share of web browsers, operating systems, and search engines, is reporting that Linux on the desktop has over 4% market share for the very first time (Statcounter records ChromeOS as a separate operating system despite being based on Linux). Statcounter doesn’t provide any explanation about why the market share has increased but we can speculate what’s going on.
Linux’s march to its 4.03% market share has been a steady process ever since the final months of 2020 when Linux held just 1.53% of desktop market share. One of the biggest contributors to the growth of Linux is likely the stringent hardware requirements of Windows 11.
I know you’re talking about Nvidia specifically, but I find it kinda funny how people say that regarding X11 and Wayland even for AMD and Intel, because for me the experience is literally the opposite – when I try playing games on Xorg, they always stutter and freeze really badly to near-unplayable extents even when FPS counters report they’re running at 60 FPS (or if I set them to the lowest possible graphics), but ever since I switched to Wayland, the issue was just gone and games run flawlessly now. And note that I’m using Plasma, the one people often said had a worse Wayland session than Gnome and Wayland-based WMs.
I don’t know why this is the case for me specifically when it seems like literally everyone else reports the opposite happening to them (and afaik Wine and most Linux games still run in XWayland). Does Xorg just hate me in particular?
Same for me, X11 is out of the question simply because it can’t do variable refresh rate on multiple monitors last I checked. And Nvidia and Wayland work together pretty well by now, at least if you are using a GTX card.
Wayland is just more responsive and smoother than x11 in all cases I’ve tried short of really old hardware. Nvidia just haven’t caught up to Wayland yet and it makes complex things like rendering a vulkan pipeline through an x11 compatibility layer buggy on Nvidia.
I’m hoping the day they finish porting wine to Wayland it’ll fix all the issues I’m having with Nvidia. Or the open source driver getting good enough for me to drop the proprietary driver.
My experience XWayland apps can get a little weird on Nvidia for some reason. I’ve witnessed flickering ui, misplaced drop shadows, and the xorg cursor popping up at the very edge of XWayland windows. On AMD Wayland just works and at least in games AMD shows an improvement while Nvidia shows a decrease in performance.
I’m definitely excited to switch to Wayland properly whenever I build my next machine and escape from my GTX 1060.