Less Than 10% Of Firefox Users On Linux Are Running Wayland

Thanks to Mozilla's Telemetry capabilities, there is some interesting insight to how many Linux desktop users are still relying on an X.Org (X11) Server without Wayland.

Phoronix reader Jan E.P. was recently pondering over Wayland's marketshare on the Linux desktop and thought of Mozilla's Telemetry capabilities. While telemetry.mozilla.org doesn't display the display server breakdown, they do track the display server in use as part of the dataset.

After he contacted the Mozilla Telemetry team, they were kind enough to generate a graph showing the breakdown of X11 vs. Wayland use for Firefox users as measured by this publicly collected data. They are allowing this data to be shared publicly but wished to pass along these important footnotes:

- Y-axis starts at 90% to better show the different layers.
- Based on a 1% representative sample of all firefox linux desktop telemetry data.
- Some distributions build Firefox with telemetry disabled, which might significantly skew the results.
- Long-term adoption trend is lost in the usual weirdness around the holidays (and gfx.linux_window_protocol hasn't been tracked for long enough).
- All except X11 are Wayland.

Now here is the graph:

X11 is showing to be in use above 90% over the span of this multi-month data and on average seems to be about 93% currently to Wayland at roughly 7%. It will be interesting to see how this data evolves overtime once Ubuntu 22.04 LTS has been out as their first long-term support release with the Wayland session by default, among other Linux distributions that have been moving towards Wayland. Keeping in mind, of course, this data is coming just from Firefox Telemetry data.

Thanks to Phoronix reader Jan for putting this together!