Source: https://linux-hardware.org/?view=os_display_server
Reporting is done by users who voluntarily upload their system specs via
# hw-probe -all -upload
this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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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.
You’re discounting the trend here. Assuming the methodology is consistent, over a short time we’re seeing a noticeable change, bias or not.
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.
But the change in the numbers is not useless since the psychology of the Wayland users vs. x11 didn't change
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".
fair
Which is probably close to every Linux user who knows about it...
That will definitely be part of it. It's going to be some cross-section of "people who know about it" and "people who are motivated to have their data recorded" which is going to skew the data in ways we can't reliably understand. Maybe "newbies" are more likely to report than grizzled neckbeards? Maybe desktops are over-represented vs. servers? Maybe one distro lets its users know about it and so its defaults are over-represented? We can't know.
I mean, it's not like it's sensitive information.
hw-probeexcludes such information.Definitely not, most newbies don't even know about it. It's really useful for gathering general hardware system info for bug reports, and I often end up having to tell newbies about it.
Absolutely true, if you look at the database it's vast majority desktop and laptop systems.
I know of no such distro, I've hopped between many popular and unpopular distros over the years, haven't found a single one that does it.
Maybe an abscure distro, but it's impact would be questionable.
Also, there's a point to be made in the other direction. The command you need to run is :
sudo -E hw-probe -all -uploadWithout -E the environment isn't preserved and it'll think you're on X11, despite being on Wayland.
I know about the tool. I've used it. I don't report my system data. I'm not "motivated" to have it recorded. I couldn't care less about their data gathering.
Since you're relying on people actively reporting their data they need to be motivated to actually do it. That doesn't mean they're afraid of what is being gathered (though have you seen the Linux community?) just that they haven't, for whatever reason, taken the time to do so.
For the rest of it - I was just giving sample potential sources of bias. I wasn't proposing any of those as actual flaws. Just that their polling methodology couldn't account for any of them or whatever actual biases may exist in their data. It's just a list of self-report crap.