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.
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.