Backwards compatibility forever sounds great, but the technical debt eventually becomes a giant fucking limitation on improvement. They chose not to stay backwards compatible for a reason.
I agree that at some point you have to be able to ditch technical debt, but you still should be able to do more or less the same things with the new system as with the old system and that’s currently still not the case.
The problem is that the architecture of Wayland and the organization around it themselves impose limitations that have a chilling effect on development for it. One issue is that Wayland has been deliberately left very slim, leaving a lot of complexity and implementation details up to the compositor. A compositor can be seen as something that approaches the size and complexity of an entire X display server. This means that if someone wants to create a window manager, they have to implement a whole compositor first. So instead of writing window manager code, which is what the developer is probably the most interested in, they are spending most of their time implementing the compositor.
Naturally this also leads to a lot of duplication of effort. For example: GNOME, KDE and the window managers that have implemented a wayland version each have their own compositor that by and large does the same thing.
Another issue is the standardization of the protocols and interfaces that the different compositors use, or lack thereof. There is a steering group containing the major stakeholders that votes on proposed extensions, but good proposals often get shot down because the major stakeholders can’t agree on it and sometimes ego or principles gets in the way. And then you have cases where one compositor just goes their own way and implements something regardless of what the others do.
For example, as a result of this there’s still no standard screen capture API, so if you want to do things like screenshots, remote desktop, desktop streaming, … whether or not you can do that, and with which tool, depends on the compositor you use. Another example: they’re currently still bickering over whether or not an application should be allowed to place windows with absolute coordinates, and how that should be implemented. We’re currently 15 years after initial release of Wayland…
In my opinion, this is all completely backwards. Both in an organizational and technical sense way too much has been left up to the individual compositors that should have been a core part of Wayland itself.
Unfortunately, it’s all too late to fix this. We’re 15 years into Wayland development, and the flawed architecture has been set in stone. Wayland isn’t going to go away soon either, too many parties are invested in it. So for me the reasonable thing to do is to wait and stick with X11 until the dust settles and something emerges on the other side that is better than what I currently have.
This means that if someone wants to create a window manager, they have to implement a whole compositor first. So instead of writing window manager code, which is what the developer is probably the most interested in, they are spending most of their time implementing the compositor.
wlroots has existed for almost 7 years and this misconception is still repeated.
I know wlroots exists. It’s a library that helps you implement a compositor (i.e. does some of the heavy lifting), but at the end of the day the window manager developer is still implementing a compositor and is responsible for maintaining his compositor.
The mere fact that wlroots, and other efforts like louvre, are necessary at all actually prove my point that it was an idiotic design to push everything off into “compositors”.
Yes. And it’s a bad analogy. Nobody is expecting you to be able to take a barge on railways. But existing linux applications are being expected to run on Wayland. As I said - railways didn’t replace canals - they’re different types of things.
Within the last 10 years and the next 5 years, software using old hacks instead of GUI toolkits are expected to switch, yes.
People can choose to continue to use X11 until KDE Plasma 6 hits Debian stable.
I don’t see a problem. Nobody forces Wayland onto anyone yet, except for bleeding edge distributions like Fedora. And unless you’ve been severely misled, you should know what you signed up for when you installed Fedora.
I didn’t say there was a problem. I’m saying it’s pretty disingenuous to act like Wayland isn’t intended as a replacement for X11. All of which you seem to agree with. As you say “nobody forces Wayland onto anyone yet” (emphasis mine).
Also - I just love how your comment is written like a politician would have written it. “Sure you can use the dirty old X11 if you really want to, or you can use the nice new God-fearing Wayland”.
If you bring the two parts of your comment together and dial back the assumptions of bad faith, you’ll get a consistent picture:
Wayland is a blank slate replacement for how to do window management on Linux. At some point it’ll become the standard for software that’s new or maintained. Unmaintained software that doesn’t talk to the internet and is therefore safe to run even with security holes will continue to be supported via XWayland. The giant scope and API surface is part of the reason why it’s deprecated. Maintainers are expected to target the new way to do things going forward, because there are people able and willing to maintain that support (many of those people former X11 maintainers who are looking forward to stop having to deal with that legacy behemoth)
That’s the state of things I wanted to express. Not my opinion, no agenda, just how I understand the situation.
Yeah sorry. But when you look at the events building europeen railways. More so in the UK as we had a huge canal system built in a few decades. But most of Europe denser areas.
Railways were very much a replacement for the to slow canal system.
Canals built a huge industry allowing manufacturers to ship goods to cities while shipping resources from the mines and farms etc.
But industries like meat fish milk and strongly enough market gardening (fresh flowers) were very limited to local areas before the railways. Took off hugely when the railways intentionally set up in direct competition to the canals.
Canals survived for a while moving the slower stuff. But started needing to redesign to support bigger and more boats faster. Before finally closing down.
The UK and most of Europe rebuilt/renovated them as a leasure activity from the 1950s. But most of the late 1800 to early 1900s railways vcompanies actually worked to replace and put canal companies out of business.
Passenger rail really was not a big thing untill about the 1920s.
We’re getting well away from the topic now. It depends on what you mean by “replace”. Railways and canals exist side-by-side as different solutions to similar problems - sure. And some railways have replaced some canals. But the panama canal will not be replaced by a railroad for example. It couldn’t do the same job. The pros/cons of each option depends on many factors.
The analogy is poor for comparing software. Linux distros will likely replace X11 with Wayland over time. To do the same thing that X11 was doing. It will be replaced “in place”. The very same thing you were using with X11 will now need to work on Wayland. This would be like running your barges on the railroad? Maybe? Depending on how you squint?
I wouldn’t expect my barge to work on the railroad. I do expect that Firefox will run on Wayland after having used it on X11 for 20 years.
But as a user of a barge if you needed wanted to use railways. Because they are faster. It would be the barge maker or a new train maker you would look at. Not the railway.
Just like canals X11 still exists. And is still being developed. It has its limitations but some applications are choosing not to port. Because like barge makers. They simply do not see the need. Or merit.
If the makers of railways insisted that all current users agents had to work on them without adaption. Many of the advantages would no longer be there.
Just as if waylaid did not expect Firefox et al to adapt to its methods. The security and other advantages they seek would not be practice.
Waylaid is a replacement. Not an upgrade.
(PS yeah living in the UK replace canal with inland waterways navigation. Tends to be how we think of it. As they are such a huge part of our industrial history. I forget the US really never went through that part of europeen industrial development. Your example is a fairly unique and modern by comparison, it dose not link to any network. Where as the inland waterways accross the UK and parts of Europe were a linked inferstructure like our railways. When the railways in Europe were built. They were very much seen as a replacement to our existing canal system. By both the corperations set up to build the inferstructure and the media of the time. It is literally a part of our industrial history thought is schools here. As so much of our culture and industrial revolution is built around the events)
when I use a windows laptop, I don’t really take over my Mac habits (e.g. CMD-OPT-ESC, or using 4 finger pinch or 3 finger swipe up or down), however when using a MacBook even when remoting in to a windows computer I automatically use what I am used to on my MacBook.
do you find that you have some frustration with the user experience and interfacing with asahi linux on your MacBook? i.e. you use the gestures lets say that you would use and they don’t work, or rather, you could make it work but it’s too much trouble.
if it’s a painless kind of switch over, then I think I would be willing to learn or relearn or customize the desktop environment to my liking even if it took a bit of time. however if it’s bug-laden and ‘appears’ to be too much like macOS on the onset, it would probably be more trouble than it’s worth at the moment to use as a daily driver (dual booting in this case would make it even more confusing to demarcate for me).
so yeah that’s a lot to ask you for what your thoughts & experiences were…
Interesting to read those linked GNOME issue threads, they’re really living up to their reputation… Looks like KDE is becoming the premier gaming DE, and I’m pretty happy with that.
Because app manager doesn’t work well. And there are the feedback on terminal that tell you about missing dependencies or broken packages…The fact you get those verbose log help for doing web research and solve lot problems. On GUI installing app isn’t well done : it’s slow, they don’t tell you what they are doing nor why it fail.
The only limitation of terminal is when you want to work with file system. I need to see the tree and typing ls -a everytime isn’t efficient. Example, i’m doing a git clone on a server throught ssh. But i have no way to know its structure and check if i downloaded it in the correct directory. I need a visual that tell me this folder is here, has those writing permission, is a tar archive… So i use both : filezilla and terminal, gui and cli. In fact, they are both very useful, so there no point comparing gui and cli, they both serve well their purpose.
I’m using CLI and GUI. For example, if i want to chose the correct keyboard and check its mapping : gui. If i want to add sources and its gpg key : app manager gui. There is no way i would enjoy typing this huge command line with flags from my mind, and i do lot mistype. Or installing the stack lamp ? on windows it was amazing and faster than linux. next, next, done.
For filesystems I have another gripe: if I move a file to another directory and I want to swap to the directory I just copied the stuff to I have to enter the whole path again…
You didn’t mention if you’ll be watching movies or playing videos games; if so, then you’ll wanna look for some headphones with “low latency mode” because regular bluetooth headphones will introduce about a quarter-of-a-second lag—hardly an issue if you’re just listening to music, but very noticeable when you’re watching videos or playing games.
Two low latency headphones that have worked well for me are the E600 Pro by Ankbit and the NC35 by Srhythm, both of which are in your price range (under $100 on Amazon).
EDIT 1: Both of these headphones pair with the low latency USB dongle from 1Mii, which is sold separately for around $30.
EDIT 2: Here’s a video to test the latency of your current set of headphones. I found it easiest to test by holding a piece of paper up to my screen so I could tell if the moving white bar was visible or not by the time I heard the beep. Another way that I tested was to record while holding my headphones up to my separate wired USB microphone, and then opening up the audio tracks from the latency test video itself and my recording in Audacity, at which point the latency is very visible.
Worth noting that technically, pretty much every pair of headphones will have “some” latency, but where it starts becoming a problem is anything more than 50 to 100 milliseconds, which is very noticeable when you’re playing a game and the sounds are not in sync with your in-game actions—likewise when you’re watching a video with spoken words where the words are not in sync with the subject’s lips.
If you’re just casually listening to music, there’s no issue, but anything that involves video and audio together will be very noticeable.
How common is it that they don’t have that? because it’s a long time since I had latency issues in years of Bluetooth headphones. Anker, Phillips, Sennheiser, Shokz, all sub $100 headphones and I haven’t had latency.
Maybe you happened to have low latency phones, but in my experience the low latency is explicitly marketed somewhere in the product description or on the packaging. I believe there are also different low latency technologies. For example, the 1Mii dongle and both of my wireless headphones use aptX technology.
To be clear, you’re saying you’ve watched videos and/or played video games with all your old headphones and never noticed any latency?
Yes - videos. I don’t recall latency problems since many years ago with some cheapo external speakers. FWIW I just tried a latency test on Youtube to check (currently on Shokz) and it seemed good. Frankly I have no idea if some low latency tech is being automatically used but I certainly didn’t take any steps to ensure it was (Ubuntu, these days using Pipewire).
Honestly, if you’re not using nix to deploy systems or need it to create reproducible environments across systems, then NixOS is a bit overkill.
I want to use NixOS for servers and embedded systems as well, so I run it on my laptop. But the user experience gives Gentoo a run for it’s money for being the most finnicky bastard in the distro world. They would both contend if there was a Razzy award for usability.
I tried it out, and it was so cumbersome to install packages that I gave up. I understand its application in servers, but for home computers it’s a pain in the ass
FocusWriter for a minimalist, focused writing experience. You can edit the existing template for a dark theme and white text. I rather like the typewriter font, Liberation Mono (it was Courier something back on Windows). Give it a try. I’ve been using it for around 3-4 years.
I jumped onto the FreeBSD train a year ago and needed some virtualization tool for my job. A started using bhyve and must say that I am quite happy with it and don’t plan to move to any other tool soon. Not sure how it compares to other tools performance wise but it does the job for me.
I’ve really wanted to try bhyve but the lack of hardware passthrough support (PCIe GPU passthrough in my case) compared to KVM keeps me from it as of right now. Looks really good though.
To all gentoo detractors… 20 years ago compiling a browser would take 5 days (as in 24 x 5 hours…) So you are not allowed to complain TODAY about compile times ahahahaahaha ahahaha ahah haha aaaaaaaaah ಠ_ಠ
I remember jumping from Ubuntu (my first distro) to a Gentoo stage 2 install in 2005. I was using it on my desktop so I needed a GUI. I was using either a high end P4 or an X2 Athlon. I attempted to compile KDE and all the deps. It would compile X for about 10-20 hours… and then the compilation would break with a seemingly obscure error message.
I tried a few times and never did get a GUI built.
I’ve considered giving it a go again since I have a 24 core Threadripper which could easily compile everything pretty quickly, I just never got around to it.
Try accidentally emerge world on a full desktop environment with open office and said browser on a Pentium 2 after changing some base level compile flags… Oh, and I was on dial-up. Didn’t do that again.
I got Gentoo on a DVD with instructions in a magazine for a Stage 1 build. No internet connection at that stage so I had to work through problems myself. Took a few goes but I learnt a heck of a lot about how Linux boots.
Been a very long time so apologies if I got some details wrong.
Yeah I remember trying it out on a k6-2 400 MHz (maybe? I don’t remember if that was it’s rated speed of it it was with the bus at 112mhz) and it was days of downloading sources and even more for compiling. I think there was a bootable CD bundled with some zine that allowed you to have something running on your machine
Yet color management seems to have negative priority for Wayland while the Wayland push is strong at present. Shit or not, at least X11 has basic color management via ICC profiles; Wayland be like ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It’s very fast and nearly always gives me the results I want without extra bullshit. For example using bc or qalc to do a quick unit conversion vs launching a calculator app for the same purpose.
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