2009 Linux Graphics Survey Results

The fifth question in our annual survey asked what version of X.Org was being used on their system(s). The most popular choice was X.Org 7.4. This is to no surprise at all considering it has been around for more than a year and X.Org 7.5 was not even released until October. There are very few distributions running with X.Org 7.5 aside from Fedora, while most of the distributions over the past year have been running with X.Org 7.4 and X Server 1.5 or X Server 1.6. X.Org 7.5 was the second most popular choice followed by X.Org 7.3. As percentages, X.Org 7.4 had controlled just over half of the systems at 54.5%, X.Org 7.5 at 31%, and X.Org 7.3 at 7.4%. Only 1.1% of those participating in this Phoronix survey were running a Git master snapshot of X.Org.

After asking about the X.Org versions, we next asked what display features (if any) they were using whether it be TV-Out, multiple display heads, output hot-plugging, or GPU power saving modes. Among the four choices, multiple display heads was most popular followed by GPU power saving modes, then output hot-plugging, and then finally in last was TV-Out.

The seventh question focused on finding out how their display / X configuration was being handled. A majority of the users were using a graphical utility like nvidia-settings, system-config-display, or AMD Catalyst Control Linux Edition. However, in a very close second was still modifying the xorg.conf file manually. It's rather sad to see that in 2009/2010 that so many users continue to modify their configuration files by hand that there aren't graphical or CLI utilities available (or that they are aware of) that can suit their configuration needs. If Linux is to become a mainstream operating system with consumers, they must not need to be introduced to editing the xorg.conf themselves. Last year though modifying the xorg.conf file manually was the most popular choice, so at least it is losing ground these days. In third for this question was using the xrandr CLI utility followed by using a vendor-specific CLI utility like nvidia-xconfig and aticonfig.