Nvidia appeared fairly buggy as of nvidia 535 and kernel 6.3 with both sway and Plasma 5.27. Notably of all the possible choices for Wayland support ONLY KDE in relatively recent releases supports proper scaling of apps using xwayland which are apt to be a thing for a while now. This is a huge point in KDE’s favor despite loving the idea of an i3 like experience with sway.
If prior experience bears out plasma 6.0 will be buggy as fuck and 6.2 will be excellent.
Nouveau has NEVER been a particularly good choice and its primary developer just resigned www.phoronix.com/news/Nouveau-Maintainer-Resigns I wouldn’t pin my hopes on it in the future becoming usable. I sure as hell wouldn’t say its a useful choice NOW because you suppose it may become so in the future. I’d rather look at nvidias official open source effort.
If I had a crystal ball to look in I bet it would say a lot of folks with existing Nvidia hardware are best off sticking with X11 in 2023 but looking again at KDE’s wayland session in 2024.
Although do bear in mind people using stable distros like Ubuntu/Mint/Debian will be a lot longer seeing new useful features pushed out.
I always interpreted that as a factor of the Plasma team being willing to offer compatibility for things that broke the freedesktop spec.
Whereas Gnome / Mutter for example appear to believe that if they don’t strictly follow spec it’ll perpetuate the fragmentation.
I tend to side with the latter perspective but use KDE + kwin on my desktop for gaming for Wayland + vrr (it’s amazing how smooth and responsive this is). Gnome really shines on the notebook form factor so I use it there.
NVidia user here, it most certainly is not working well. My external monitor for my laptop is getting black boxes shadowing the kde menu and most of my windows on that screen, and often block boxes trailing the mouse.
Is there a community or database where people have tested different plugins on Linux either natively or with Wine to see if they can get things working?
There is, if you look up yabridge that’s like a plugin bridge that natively runs windows vsts in reaper for Linux through wine with almost no hassle. They have a list somewhere
Doesn’t it get tiring to create new accounts only to post the same stuff time and time again, only to get it downvoted, removed, and banned time and time again? What do you get out of it? Do you masturbate to the comment sections?
I know but both Ubuntu and Android do it for a purpose: Include as many people as possible, most people like Ubuntu but dislike Android. I love both, because they are the pillars of open source along with Debian.
the Linux leader from my Linux usergroup uses Debian 11 with Xfce so technically he is being classic. I use Ubuntu with GNOME, it’s the best for both beginners and pro.
the person who organizes the Linux speeches and does other things including the website and posters. I sometimes help him get posters and other stuff done, it’s a community!!
As an addition to other responses, think that most apps (specially smaller ones) are developed using some framework or set of libraries that might or might not support those protocols.
So let’s pretend that I have an app buit using Electron and that framework does not support Wayland. There’s nothing I can do on the app side until Electron supports Wayland in this fake example.
So it actually takes time for the libraries to support the new protocol and then app developers to update their apps to support it aswell.
That’s why you see that the Wayland migration is incremental and not all at once.
There shouldn’t be another Linus. The model of a single maintainer holding so much importance is fundamentally flawed, especially for a project with the size and importance of Linux. Responsibilities and decision making should be distributed among stakeholders and volunteers. It will take time to rebuild around that sort of structure.
I’ve also heard tell that the linux-kernel mailing list has become extremely toxic, especially to newcomers. A professor that I have a lot of respect for has stopped teaching his kernel drivers course because one of his students received death threats related to her involvement. If a change in the tenor doesn’t happen, less and less of the fresh blood that Linux needs will join.
Many people have predicted the death of the small, independent window manager with the coming of Wayland. I have heard multiple times that only large projects like GNOME and KDE would be able to take on the burden of making a compositor.
Now, I do think that lots of no longer actively developed window managers could get left behind. But the idea that it will be too complicated to create a window manager now is turning out to be wrong.
First, fewer desktop environments are getting left behind than feared. XFCE, Cinnamon, and MATE all seem to have Wayland plans now.
The big change is the appearance of not one but multiple compositor libraries designed to make it easier to create a window manager for Wayland. Some of them look like they might make it easier than it was under X. The approach taken by this one makes the idea of hacking around with it very inviting.
Although having to create a compositor has made things difficultly until now, I think the idea of decoupling the compositor for Wayland is going to look smart in the long run.
Being separate from Wayland, compositor devs are free to experiment and window manager authors can select the one that best maps to their goals.
I was reading up on Oasis Linux yesterday. It comes with a Wayland compositor ( SWC ) and tiling window manager ( Velox ) that are less than 20,000 lines of code combined!
It would not be practical for a light-weight distro to trim down Xorg like that. But I the compositor is separate, it can be either smaller or feature rich. SWC is XWayland compatible but obviously that is going to add more size if you need it.
Looking forward to the window manager innovation that projects like Louvre enable.
People using X window manage will just keep using them. Wayland doesn’t offer anything valuable to most users so people will just keep using the managers they like. In 10-20 years we will get some nice, new managers that naturally will support Wayland and people will switch because of the features, not because ‘X insecure, Wayland awesome’ BS.
Wayland is already a lot nicer to use over X. Better gestures, better animations, better performance, and that’s if you use Wayland today, not in a year’s time.
Like I get why people are defensive over X but it literally isn’t being developed anymore - And if it’s really worth keeping over Wayland the time to get contributors to support it is passing quickly.
I agree with your overall sentiment with the caveat that 20 years will be closer to 5. Early adopters are enjoying Wayland only benefits today. For example, the Steam Deck just launched with HDR and mainline support for Linux gamers in general will not be far behind.
Also, the list of window managers being left behind is starting to look less appealing than the list of window managers that are Wayland only. Hyperland is probably already more popular than WindowMkaer. As GNOME and KDE go Wayland only, they will continue to add features that regular users will want. I see more announcements for new Wayland compositors than I do for new X window managers.
Another factor that gets missed is that the main dev support for X comes from Red Hat. RHEL9 is already Wayland based. When RHEL8 comes off support in 5 years, Red Hat will abandon X. How long will X stay viable after that?
As the number of X users dwindle, we will see toolkits drop support for X. GTK5 for example. 5 years may be too soon for that but I cannot see it taking 20 years.
Wayland being “valuable to most users” will come faster than you think.
Not very (new) user friendly, wouldn’t use it. Too complicated for me
BlendOS
Doesn’t offer much new stuff for me, nothing they offer is substantial for me.
Small dev team
VanillaOS
"The new Linux Mint"
Huge focus on usability and user friendliness
Apx is basically only a wrapper for distrobox
Small dev team (the same one that also develops Bottles)
Huge potential, but not quite there yet
Will recommend it to new users when it’s updated to 2.0
Silverblue
My recommendation
Is one of the oldest immutables and very well thought out
Biggest dev and userbase
You can not only install Flatpaks, but also everything else with Distrobox and rpm-ostree
Best feature: you can easily rebase to it’s other spins or the custom ones from uBlueI just rebased this weekend from the SB to the Kinoite-Spin in just one command. I was able to “change distro” without resinstalling, and KDE was installed very cleanly without leftovers.
I mean seeing how people here act after having been on nixos for a few weeks I would say it’s an apt comparison. I swear we weren’t that obnoxious when I started using the distro in 2019 D:
I don’t think it’s an apt comparison of the distros, but I agree that both have a cult-like following. I also feel like there’s a bit of a difference in the evangelism of both distros… I don’t really understand why people evangelize Arch, and my impression is largely that (1) people mention that they’re on Arch so others know they might be having different configuration issues, or less charitably (2) people mention Arch as a weird brag because it’s seen as an “advanced” distro. In contrast people seem to recommend nix and NixOS because it solves a frankly ridiculous amount of real problems that people experience with development environments, package managers, and system management. I.e., we bring up nix and NixOS because we care about you and think it might actually be useful for you. I don’t really want to dictate what other people use or brag about using nix / NixOS, but people complain to me about different problems constantly that are just resolved by nix, so it feels wrong not to mention it. It’s frustrating because it definitely makes you seem like you’re in a cult, but it really is the right level of abstraction for package management, and as a result it solves so many problems and little frustrations.
Honestly, it’s kind of frustrating to watch people not use nix. I have nix set up for the projects at work because I got tired of them not building and people randomly changing dependencies and it taking 3-4 weeks for somebody new to the project to get the thing to compile. Everybody new that I have set up with nix gets the project working instantly, and everybody else ends up spending weeks flailing around with installation. Unfortunately, I’ve given up on recommending people use nix for the project because a number of senior people have decided that they don’t like nix and there’s a bizarre amount of drama whenever I recommend a newbie just use it to get set up (even though it has always worked out better for them). It’s just not worth the headache for me to stick my neck out, but I feel bad and it’s really frustrating how literally everybody else takes 3-4 weeks to get up and running without nix :|.
I tried NixOS and was quite frustrating when I needed community help / documentation. I guess that’s the aspect of “the new arch”, the community will go “not my problem fix it yourself”. I’ve seen some good tutorials on YT popped up since then, so I’ll try it again once I get college vacation. It’s hard for me as a non programmer/psychology student. My field doesn’t overlap with programming not by a little, lmao. I think you need to recommend nix and have the way people need to do things. Like, a nix flake? You can get it to work 100 ways, and nix uses its own language and way of declaring things. That’s one thing that made me go “I just need to have a working system and I have a Arch install script done”. I like to fiddle around with things, but when you are stuck with something and there isn’t a clear path to do it, it gets frustrating. The 100 ways to 1 thing makes copycat difficult, because you have to copy the same person, which will not have all the needs for you, or find people that did their config the same way (which is really hard). Like, overlays, packaging programs, making modules, even Arch had a “this is how you get things done” wiki. I really think Nix and NixOS is really good and I will try it out again in some months.
Yeah, I don’t have good answers for you… I honestly don’t know what the best way to get people into it is. The resources really are not great.
FWIW I think when it does end up clicking everything is a LOT less complicated than it seems at first. Nix is sort of all about building up these attribute sets and then once that really sinks in everything starts to make a lot more sense and you start to realize that there aren’t that many moving parts and there isn’t much magic going on… but getting there is tricky. A lot of people recommend the nix pills, and honestly I think it’s the best way to understand nix itself. If you do earnestly read through them I think there is a good chance you will come out enlightened… they just start so slow and so boringly that it’s tempting to skip ahead and then you’re doomed. They also have a bit of a bad habit of introducing simple examples that don’t work at first which can be confusing, and eventually some of the later stuff seems like “ugh, I thought we already solved this” but it’s building up nicer abstractions. The nix pills give a pretty good overview of best practices in that sense, I think… so maybe it’s the source of truth you’re looking for (or part of it anyway). I think the nix pills are a bit more “how the sausage is made” than is necessary to use nix, but it’s probably the best way to understand what all of these weird mkDerivation functions you keep seeing are actually doing, and having an understanding of the internals of nix makes it a lot easier to understand what’s going on.
ah I think that’s where I’m at odds with a lot of lemmy NixOS users then 😅, since I am and have always been pretty hesitant to recommend NixOS to anyone in particular. I find the upfront costs of NixOS too big for me to recommend the OS to anyone who wasn’t already looking into it and knows its downsides and upsides.
I do agree however on the fact that using nix is purely beneficial. It doesn’t hurt if you just add a .nix file to your project, since it doesn’t do any harm to an already existing project. It can just install your build tools and then consider itself done, and if you don’t happen to like nix after all, the new installer makes uninstalling easier than ever. There is pretty much no downside to downloading the package manager, something I can’t say about the OS.
Having said that, I don’t think nix should be the end-all be-all standard in package management. I’m sure there will be other package managers that will be better than “nix but with yaml sprinkled in”, and are capable of improving the state of the art. At least, that’s something I hope to happen. For example, I have reservations about using a full-blown programming language for doing my project configuration (see people’s problems with Gradle for why you might not want that). I think a maven-style approach (where you’d have just limited config options, but can expand the package manager’s capabilities by telling it to install certain plugins (in the same config file!)), could be worth looking into, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t on the look out for a potential better nix alternative
For sure! I don’t think we’re actually in disagreement at all, just the limits of text communication :). NixOS is certainly less important to me and I don’t really care if people use it or not at all (it’s nice but there’s enough differences that you have to be aware of that it’d be frustrating to some people — even if ultimately those differences are something that can be worked around… If you’re well versed in nix and Linux NixOS is kind of a no brainer, though). Nix for development (or something like it) is legitimately enough of a game changer to warrant some of the evangelism in my opinion, particularly since as you mention it’s pretty much free to try on any (non-windows) system, and adding nix to a project doesn’t harm non-nix users (more than they’re already harmed anyway, haha). I’ll admit that I worry about how “nix ugly and unintuitive” seems to be a huge problem for adoption, and frankly I don’t blame people for bouncing off of nix (I bounced off of nix in 2011 or so and didn’t come back to it for like 10 years — though it was a bit of a brain worm nagging at me the whole time). That said I think the impression people have of nix being this horrible and completely ugly language (an impression I’ve had in the past as well) is also somewhat untrue. The nix language itself isn’t so bad, but the expectation is for it to just be yaml because “I just want to list dependencies”, which is fair and it might be nice if we had some better abstractions to make that more clear. All of the phases in a nix derivation are confusing and poorly documented, and some operations on attribute sets should probably just have nice special syntax instead of these fancy update fixpoints that the average developer isn’t going to understand… ultimately I’m a little unclear on how much of this is “the nix language sucks and needs to be thrown out” and how much is “we really need a better introduction to what this is and how to use it, especially with some beginner examples and best practices for different languages”. I worry a bit about non-nix nix package managers just from the perspective that it’s really nice to have the one tool to rule all development environments, but maybe fragmentation won’t be a huge problem.
While I’ve looked into Fedora Silverblue, that distro is limited to only install Flatpaks, which is fine for “apps”, but seems to be more of a problem with managing system- and CLI tools.
No. Your understanding to Fedora Silverblue is wrong. I can just run rpm-ostree install package.name in Silverblue, like other Fedora spins. The small disadvantage is that I need to reboot to apply this update. (re-construct)
but doesn’t that result in new A/B snapshots, or something like that?
Well, you can call it snapshots, but there is no need to think about it. In most cases, the system points to the newest snapshot (deployment 0). If a rollback is needed, I can pin to the older deployments. When a major change is to be applied (Like bump Fedora version), I’d manually mark the current deployment as dont-auto-delete.
Sure, but I’d like to have a more seamless experience, i.e. not having to open/start any “containers” or something like that.
I never used toolbox in my Fedora Silverblue system. I feel that I can’t tell the difference between using Silverblue and the default Fedora spin
It depends on if the changes needs it or not. You can set a reboot flag on a given task and at the end the system will reboot, but if no reboot is needed then it will just make the change live.
My approach has been to slowly learn how to play to the strengths of Linux and not pine after anything on Windows because ultimately I’ve gained a lot more than I’ve lost.
The one piece of software I haven’t been able to avoid keeping around is Sigma Studio, so I have a 10 year old shit top for running it, but it also runs in a VM if I need it. Thankfully I only need to use it once or twice a year.
If you rely on multiple pieces of software for important everyday activities and they aren’t usable in wine or a VM, you probably have no choice but to use the operating system that is the best vehicle for those tools. Doesn’t stop you from also using linux for other stuff, but I can understand how that’s not the same as going all in.
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