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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • This totally might be true, but the fact that he got as far as measuring the same latency on X and Wayland… and then just gave up and is like “well never mind what the measurements say, it’s definitely Wayland”… Hmm.

    You gotta do the measurements. It’s probably not even that hard, all you need is a USB mouse emulator (any microcontroller with USB peripheral support can do this and there are tons of examples) and a photodiode.

    You don’t even need to worry about display latency if you are just comparing X with Wayland.




  • Would be cool to have more people on Linux finding and fixing these little details.

    Unlikely to happen. This is very complicated low level stuff that’s often completely undocumented. Often the hardware is buggy but it works with Windows/Mac because that’s what it’s been tested with, so you’re not even implementing a spec, you’re implementing Windows’ implementation.

    Also the few people that have the knowledge to do this a) don’t want to spend a ton of money buying every model of monitor or whatever for testing, and b) don’t want to spend all their time doing boring difficult debugging.

    I actually speak from experience here. I wrote a semi-popular FOSS program for a type of peripheral. Actually it only supports devices from a single company, but… I have one now. It cost about £200. The other models are more expensive and I’m not going to spend like £3k buying all the other models so I can test it properly. The protocol is reverse engineered too so… yeah I’ll probably break it for other people, sorry.

    This sort of thing really only works commercially IMO. It’s too expensive, boring and time consuming for the scratch-an-itch developers.


  • Yeah there’s no way I trust their methodology has stayed that stable over 15 years. Hell if you just look in the last year supposedly 3% of global users jumped from Mac to Windows in a single month (Nov 2023).

    There are also loads of new Linux device classes that may have Linux in their user agent but aren’t really “the year of the Linux desktop” that you’re thinking of. It seems they try to count ChromeOS (though badly - seems like “Unknown” contains a lot of ChromeOS depending on the month), and obviously Android, but what about Steam Deck? Smart devices with web browsers built in? Is your Tesla desktop Linux?

    I’d buy it’s gone up; not to 4% though. I would be moderately surprised if 4% of web users had even heard of Linux.