I’m going to post this thread anytime I get some random screaming about how Linux is soooo much easier than Windows.
On a more serious note, Wayland is a dumpster fire, and has been for many years now. I have up after spending a few hours dicking around in xdotool trying to get mouse gestures to work only to find out I should have been using the new ydotool…
Fuck all of that. Linux desktop really could use a benevolent dictator that has some vision and understanding what the average user wants.
This bullshit is the number 1 detractor of adoption.
Fuck all of that. Linux desktop really could use a benevolent dictator that has some vision and understanding what the average user wants.
It already has these. They're called Linux Distros. They decide the combination of packages that make up the end to end experience. And they're all aimed at different types of user.
Why are none explicitly aimed at the average Windows user? I suspect there's one major reason. The average Windows user is incapable of installing an operating system at all, and new PCs invariably come with Windows pre-installed. This isn't a sleight on them by the way, it's just that most computer users don't want or need to know how anything works. They just want to turn it on, and post some crap on Twitter/X then watch cat videos. They don't have an interest in learning how to install another operating system.
Also, a distro aimed at an average Windows user would need to be locked down hard. No choice of window manager, no choice of X11/Wayland. No ability to install applications not in the distro's carefully curated repository, plus MAYBE independently installed flatpak/other pre-packaged things. The risk of allowing otherwise creates a real risk of the system breaking on the next big upgrade. I don't think most existing Linux users would want to use such a limiting distro.
Unless Microsoft really cross a line to the extent that normal users actually don't want anything to do with windows, I cannot imagine things changing too much.
Your entire paragraph is correct in most ways and really games the issues when Linux desktop in a nutshell. None of that will work for the average user.
My point was, the next time I see someone scream just use Linux, it’s easy, I will post this.
It’s not easy, and it’s somewhat baked in due to the design goals. IMO it would be better if that were accepted instead of bashing windows and osx. I realize I’m off topic by the end there but I felt the need to elaborate.
I understand where you’re coming from but the point you make is fundamentally wrong. I consider myself to be a Linux newbie and I’ve never ever seen ANYONE suggest Linux as an “easier” alternative to Windows. Never. I’ve always seen people put clear warnings when recommending Linux and always making sure the person, who is the beginner, knows and is aware about all the shortcomings Linux has in certain areas and challenges one might face when trying to use Linux. Maybe there are some out there but you cannot take them as the caricature of majority of people who recommend Linux to beginners.
The comparison you make is not even apples-to-apples, maybe oranges-to-apples. Sure they’re both OSes but everything else about them is very different. Trying to use Linux as Windows ensures that you will have a bad/subpar experience. Now that last one is kind of becoming irrelevant (or less common) as more and more Distros try to be more beginner friendly but the notion still stands.
People bash Windows and OSX because of their clear shortcomings and failings in many areas and yes there are many who just think Linux is plain superior (they wouldn’t be wrong but they wouldn’t be right either) but I’ve not seen one person call Linux perfect. All those that use it know where Linux falls short and wholeheartedly accept it. I understand that you’re trying to make the general user more aware of the issues Linux has but your way to do so only generates fear mongering, not awareness. I’d argue most popular distros “Just work” for most use cases except (like you mentioned) gaming. All this X.org vs Wayland stuff is for those who wish to dig deeper into Linux, the average user will simply not care about it. All they care about is using their system without any hitches.
I’m going to post this thread anytime I get some random screaming about how Linux is soooo much easier than Windows.
What a ridiculous straw man. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody promote Linux but claiming that it’s easier than Windows.
This bullshit is the number 1 detractor of adoption.
That’s a trend I’ve noticed from Linux critics: they had some bad experience due to a use case that they didn’t feel was properly catered to, and because they had a bad experience, that’s the reason why more people aren’t choosing Linux.
I’ve never used mouse gestures. I’m willing to bet most users don’t. People aren’t picking up Linux and going “Aaarrrgghhh! This sucks, because I can’t program my mouse gestures!” This sounds like a power user feature. Catering to power users so that they don’t badmouth you online is not a good UX design strategy.
The fact that you don’t think people use gestures is enough for me to believe you don’t have interactions with normal users. People love their touch pads.
It’s a mess, but honestly so are a lot of critical FOSS projects (e.g.: OpenSSH, GNUPG, sudo). Curmudgeons gonna curmudgeon. There was a point of no return and that was years ago – now that Wayland’s finally becoming useable despite itself it’s probably time to come to terms with the fact that better alternatives would have arisen had anyone thought they could truly manage it.
it’s probably time to come to terms with the fact that better alternatives would have arisen had anyone thought they could truly manage it.
This is the most important takeaway. There’s a lot of people whining about Wayland, but Wayland devs are currently the only people actually willing to put in the work. Nobody wants to work on X and nobody wants to make an alternative to Wayland, so why do we keep wasting time on this topic?
This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
Same here with Wayland. All the major desktop environments and distros have or are implementing Wayland support and are phasing out X. The only reason I’m not on Wayland on my main computer already is because of a few minor bugs that should be ironed out in the next 6-12 months with the newest release of plasma.
It’s not because Wayland is unusable. I try switching to Wayland about every 6-9 months, and every time there have been fewer bugs and the bugs that exist are less and less intrusive.
Any time you get hardcore enthusiasts and technical people together in large community, this will happen. The mechanical keyboard community is the same way, people arguing about what specific formula of dielectric grease is optimal to lube your switches with and what specific method of applying it is best.
At a certain point, it becomes fundamentalism, like comic book enthusiasts arguing about timeline forks between series or theology majors fighting about some minutia in a 4th century manuscript fragment. Neither person is going to change their views, they are just practicing their arguments back and forth in ever-narrowing scopes of pros and cons, technical jargon, and the like.
Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn’t care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.
This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd
You’ll one day learn the difference between Popular and Correct.
Trump is popular, for instance.
and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
This is a “everyone tells me to get smoke detectors and I’ve never had a fire in all my 23 years of life” comment.
There’s a reason we have building codes, seat belts, traffic lights, emergency brakes, FDIC, and pilots’ licenses.
Systemd isn’t “correct” what does that even mean? If you don’t agree with the standards and practices of the systemd project, that’s fine, but don’t act like there is some golden tablet of divine standards for system process management frameworks.
I wasn’t making an argument that systemd is perfect or that other frameworks like runit are inferrior. My argument was that I’ve been running a lot of Linux servers and desktop systems for years and I’ve never experienced the “huge stability problems and nightmare daemon management” that multiple systemd haters claim I will inevitably experience.
Maybe I’m incredibly lucky, maybe I’m not actually getting deep enough into the guts of Linux for it to matter, or maybe systemd isn’t the devil incarnate that some people make it out to be.
And also, free software is a thing. So I absolutely support and encourage alternatives like runit to exist. If you want your distros and servers to only use runit, that’s totally fine. If it makes you happy, or you have some super niche edge-case that makes systemd a bad solution, go for something else, you have my blessing, not that you need it.
All of the technically-minded posts I’ve read about systemd have been positive. The only detractors seem to be the ones with less technical knowledge, complaining about “the Unix philosophy” and parroting half-understood ideas, or worse, claiming that it’s bad because they have to learn it.
I know xorg has problems, but it was good to get some insight into why Wayland is falling short. Every argument I’ve seen in favor of Wayland has been “xorg bad”.
X code is convoluted, so much so that the maintainers didn’t want to continue. AFAIK, no commercial entity has put any significant money behind Xorg and friends. Potentially unmaintained code with known bugs, unknown CVEs and demands for permission system for privacy made continuing with Xorg a near impossibility.
If you don’t want new features and don’t care about CVEs that will be discovered in future as well as the bugs (present and future), then you can continue using Xorg, and ignore all this. If not, then you need to find an alternative, which doesn’t need to be Wayland
Oh, and you might need to manage Xorg while other people and software including your distro move onto something else.
So yeah, “xorg bad” is literally the short summary for creating Mir and Wayland
Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn’t care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.
The last couple of times I tried Wayland, it broke my desktop so badly that I couldn’t even use it.
Granted, that was “a while” ago, so my experience might be better now, but it’s made me very wary of it.
What does “broke my desktop so badly that i coudlnt even use it” even mean? Such an over the top statement lol, makes it seem as if wayland is malware or smt.
I think the vast majority of users won’t change their display server without doing a fresh install, so I’m not sure if that’s a fair comparison to the average use case. That being said, you experiencing that issue is a fair reason for staying wary.
Been using Wayland through Fedora for years on multiple systems and its all been transparent. I’m not even sure what “it broke my desktop” could even mean except that you were using KDE, and that has been a buggy mess for a while when using their Wayland fork. That’s not Wayland, that’s KDE as Sway and Gnome have been stable for me for a very long time.
every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
That means simply that you have never used systemd. You have only used a linux distro.
When you use a car only from the backseat and have some driver driving it for you, then you aren’t going to have any complaint about the engine.
Systemd becomes the more horrible, the closer you get to it.
I run a bunch of Linux servers, multiple desktop instances, manage multiple IT clients, and took my first Linux certs working with Systemd management, all for years now.
But I’ll be sure to switch away from systemd when it becomes an issue…
Most people don’t give a shit and just want a system that works. As a lot of distros switch to / have switched to Wayland I have never noticed any issues in daily usage of any of my devices, in fact my surface laptop 4 can’t do external displays if I’m running x11 but that feels like a surface issue not a display manager issue. Point being that the switch is happening and a majority of users do not care as long as their systems keep running, and in my experience there’s no reason to believe they won’t.
My thoughts on this? I think people should care less about what software other people use.
Man, display servers look hard to develop and I’m glad we have two amazing/successful projects to choose between! I think the devs who work on X are doing an amazing job and it’s amazing to see how passionate the devs/users are for Wayland.
If bobby tables likes to use x because they know how it works and are comfortable with it, let them work with x! If you think it’s okay to judge/pester/shame people because some software they choose to use, shame on you! In the end, does it really matter what you use.
There aren’t any Devs working on X. That’s the whole problem. Xorg is the most modern and most popular implementation of X, was started in 2004, it no longer has any permanent maintainers, and it hasn’t been updated since 2018. Nobody alive fully understands the whole codebase, it is an unholy mess of multiple forks and multiple versions of many different projects all smushed together. There is no more room for innovation on Xorg because any time anybody fixes a bug or adds a feature, it breaks something totally unrelated. All of the big players who used to pay developers to maintain it, no longer do. Partly because they can’t find anyone willing to do it.
I’m not saying Wayland is the answer to the problem. Building a new display server protocol does not fix the problems with Xorg, and it has its own slew of problems. It really is a “rock and a hard place” situation. You’re a future-hating troglodyte who shuns innovation if you continue to use Xorg, and you’re a risk-taking early-adopter who forfeits functionality for shiny new toys, if you use Wayland.
Don’t know anything avout xorg development although I’m profitting for years off it now. Just wanted to chime in and say that the Arch maintainers put out updates pretty constantly. If the code isn’t worked on anymore then what’s happening there?
Edit: There is definitely happening stuff with the xorg-server code.
Huh, that’s weird: when I posted, I saw your your comment as a top-level comment but I now I see it as a reply. Maybe it’s a Lemmy bug; I’ll keep an eye out in future.
Auto-Type will be disabled when run with a Wayland compositor on Linux. To use Auto-Type in this environment, you must set QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb or start KeePassXC with the -platform xcb command-line flag.
I tried that, but neither option seems to work. At least not in Wayland programs, like Firefox. It works in Chromium because iirc that runs in Xwayland. That doesn’t solve my issue with Wayland though.
usually it’s an appimage, i mistakenly said binary. although there are programs that offer ELF binaries, in that case you can try running it. if it doesn’t run, check the list of runtime dependencies for the program and install what is necessary using your package manager.
They asked how to do it, I wanted to make sure that they knew that an application not existing in the repo doesn’t mean the application isn’t actually available.
Not going to lie, I think I lost interest after the 3rd reference to “Nix” and there being no guide as to whether it means Unix-like, Nix (the plan9 fork), NixOS (Linux distro), Nix (the package manager) or something referred to as “The Nix Language”
Nix the package manager uses the Nix language, and NixOS is a distro built on top of it. They’re all part of the same topic, and the article was talking about that.
Is there anything else I should keep in mind for fstab if I want to, say, not keep track of my Downloads folder when snapshotting?
Just create a separate subvolume for it. Snapshots do not work recursively, so it will be left alone.
Mount options also only take effect on the first mount of the device. Since it looks like you only have 1 btrfs device - only / needs the options, really.
Mount options also only take effect on the first mount of the device. Since it looks like you only have 1 btrfs device - only / needs the options, really.
As swap is recommended just in case all RAM is maxed it’s better to have a swap partition as swap files have certain limitations when in combined use with BTRFS:
"subvolume - cannot be snapshotted if it contains any active swapfiles"
has a chance to fragment
has issues with hibernation (that I’ve personally encountered multiple times)
doesn’t this kinda defeat the purpose/benefits of using a swapfile?
This is true for all files. Is it a bigger problem for swap?
specificly swapfiles yes, for swap partitions nope
How long ago did you have these issues?
Dec 2022, was still using and testing with swapfiles then and said fuck it as it caused too much problems.
I can’t rule out user error till I retest and strictly “follow the guide to the T” as I made modifications while following the same Arch guide for swapfile with BTRFS
edit:
also for clarification, I’m still not sure which one is optimal/best as I initially thought that using swapfile was forward thinking for the future, I’m using and recommending swap partitions as it seems to be the easiest to implement once and use continuously without any problems atm.
The reason I use a swap file is so that I can have only one partition backed by LUKS disk encryption, rather than having to screw around with lvm which comes with its own performance overhead and all. I’ve personally never had issues hibernating to.it, but given how much buggy uefi firmware is out there I’m not surprised to hear that other have issues
I don’t see how swap has much chance to fragment. A swapfile has to be fully allocated up front and cannot be CoW. If it’s allocated well in the first place, it will stay that way.
The swap code doesn’t really do I/O through the filesystem. AIUI, it locks the file, gets the disk block #s from the FS, and after that it accesses those blocks directly.
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