Ubuntu is certainly not too big to ignore. I have never seen any source say Linux (let alone Ubuntu) has more than 5% marketshare. Does your company support 800x600? How about IE6?
If I was selling software to primary school teachers I'd support 800x600.
If I was selling technology to engineers (especially CUDA types building render farms of thousands of nodes) you can bet your life I'd support Ubuntu. I wouldn't want to give them any reasons at all not to use my stuff everywhere, in case I accidentally opened a niche my competitor could dominate and expand from.
These days games are just a part of Nvidia's market.
So Wayland won't run on nVidia's (fast) drivers, because they still use the old model where X was in charge of the graphics card.
As the father of 8 and 5 year-olds, please don't support 800x600. Even in New Orleans after the storm, with my wife working in the public schools, I didn't see any 800x600 displays.
That, in the US. I think it's different in other countries.
About 50% have 1024x768.
Of the remainder, a significant number have 1024x600 resolution.
It's a 3rd world country, so tech adoption is significantly slower, but you have to consider that not all sites have the same readership (in this case, we have people that still consider typewriters to be acceptable tech).
NVIDIA is not legally obligated to support Linux; are they?
Yes, I think they are because of contracts with big guys that need Linux on things like supercomputers(almost all of them have linux inside).
If they need to wrap out a second series of drivers just for Ubuntu and Wayland, I'm not sure it's going to be quality material. Anyway, anything would be better than the current NVIDIA drivers, which are crappy as hell in my book. Now is this because X is also crappy, I can't tell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode-setting
That's some heavy commitment to support Linux right there.
Lets start with what percent of all people who own computers have a Nvidia graphics card. Considering that the mass bulk of computers have a crappy integrated chipset, and there is also ATI/AMD out there, I can safely say <50%.
Among those 50% what percent are Linux users? Wouldn't it be expected the kind of people enthused enough to buy a discrete graphics card are also the kind of people with the interest to try Linux?
I imagine it is a number higher than 5%, maybe only 10 or 15%, but it is higher.
(In fact, I’m having trouble coming up with a reason for a desktop Linux user to buy a discrete graphics card)