heres the thing: as a decade+ software dev, I never want to even think about my distro.
I just want Linux terminal style commands, and Linux style ssh shit to just work in the most middle of the road way as possible. I’m trying to get a job done, not build a personality.
I used Arch for AUR, but with flatpak getting more popular these last few years even the more niche stuff I had to rely on AUR for got a flatpak. So I’ve been trying out immutable distros like Fedora Kinoite.
I interpreted “middle of the road” as doing nothing special, just normal tasks done a normal way and therefore hoping everything just works so you can focus on work
I only ever have Mac stuff from employers, but it is nice hardware and linux-like enough for me to be happy.
Probably also helps Mac that every windows machines provided by an employer is some random HP buttbook that looks and preforms like it could be from 2021 or 2012, who knows
I’d argue for a basic use case most distro’s would work well, right? All come with a browser, a PDF reader, and some word doc/spreadsheet program. I truly hate using windows at school, so I just plug in a USB, restart, and boot from the USB. Otherwise Firefox always needs updating, which results in freezing 1/10 times, and I need to make an adobe account to simply read a PDF.
All come with a browser, a PDF reader, and some word doc/spreadsheet program.
Strictly speaking, “All” is a bit of a stretch - Arch doesn’t come with any of those by default, neither does Gentoo, or for that matter, nor do any of the minimal/netinstall/server variants of other distros.
It depends on the definition of "support ended". Like, there are various forms of extended support that you can pay for for versions of Windows, and some companies do.
Support for the original release of Windows XP (without a service pack) ended on August 30, 2005.[4] Both Windows XP Service Pack 1 and 1a were retired on October 10, 2006,[4] and both Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 reached their end of support on July 13, 2010, about 24 months after the launch of Windows XP Service Pack 3.[4] The company stopped general licensing of Windows XP to OEMs and terminated retail sales of the operating system on June 30, 2008, 17 months after the release of Windows Vista.[114] However, an exception was announced on April 3, 2008, for OEMs producing what it defined as "ultra low-cost personal computers", particularly netbooks, until one year after the availability of Windows 7 on October 22, 2009. Analysts felt that the move was primarily intended to compete against Linux-based netbooks, although Microsoft's Kevin Hutz stated that the decision was due to apparent market demand for low-end computers with Windows.[115]
So for those, we're all definitely a decade past the end of normal support. However, they have their extended support packages that can be purchased, and we aren't a decade past the end of those...but most users probably aren't actually getting those:
On April 14, 2009, Windows XP exited mainstream support and entered the extended support phase; Microsoft continued to provide security updates every month for Windows XP, however, free technical support, warranty claims, and design changes were no longer being offered. Extended support ended on April 8, 2014, over 12 years after the release of Windows XP; normally Microsoft products have a support life cycle of only 10 years.[118] Beyond the final security updates released on April 8, no more security patches or support information are provided for XP free-of-charge; "critical patches" will still be created, and made available only to customers subscribing to a paid "Custom Support" plan.[119] As it is a Windows component, all versions of Internet Explorer for Windows XP also became unsupported.[120]
In January 2014, it was estimated that more than 95% of the 3 million automated teller machines in the world were still running Windows XP (which largely replaced IBM's OS/2 as the predominant operating system on ATMs); ATMs have an average lifecycle of between seven and ten years, but some have had lifecycles as long as 15. Plans were being made by several ATM vendors and their customers to migrate to Windows 7-based systems over the course of 2014, while vendors have also considered the possibility of using Linux-based platforms in the future to give them more flexibility for support lifecycles, and the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) has since endorsed Windows 10 as a further replacement.[121] However, ATMs typically run the embedded variant of Windows XP, which was supported through January 2016.[122] As of May 2017, around 60% of the 220,000 ATMs in India still run Windows XP.[123]
Furthermore, at least 49% of all computers in China still ran XP at the beginning of 2014. These holdouts were influenced by several factors; prices of genuine copies of later versions of Windows in the country are high, while Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences warned that Windows 8 could allegedly expose users to surveillance by the United States government,[124] and the Chinese government banned the purchase of Windows 8 products for government use in May 2014 in protest of Microsoft's inability to provide "guaranteed" support.[125] The government also had concerns that the impending end of support could affect their anti-piracy initiatives with Microsoft, as users would simply pirate newer versions rather than purchasing them legally. As such, government officials formally requested that Microsoft extend the support period for XP for these reasons. While Microsoft did not comply with their requests, a number of major Chinese software developers, such as Lenovo, Kingsoft and Tencent, will provide free support and resources for Chinese users migrating from XP.[126] Several governments, in particular those of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, elected to negotiate "Custom Support" plans with Microsoft for their continued, internal use of Windows XP; the British government's deal lasted for a year, and also covered support for Office 2003 (which reached end-of-life the same day) and cost £5.5 million.[127]
For the typical, individual end user, one probably wants to have been off Windows XP by 2008.
C bindings and APIs generally work much better in Rust because the language works a lot more like C than it does C++.
Qt depends a lot on C++ class inheritance, and even does some preprocessing of C++ files to generate code in those classes. That’s obviously not possible when using Rust. And it looks like you need a fair bit of unsafe there and there to use it at all too.
Meanwhile, GTK being a C library, its integration with Rust is much more transparent and nice.
So if you’re making a GUI Rust app, you’re just kind of better off with GTK at the moment. It’s significantly easier and nicer.
Having made the choice to use GTK for a Rust project years ago - before a lot of the more Rust-friendly frameworks were around - this is exactly why I chose it. Nothing to do with DEs or any of that, just looking for a better coding experience. Now I’d probably choose one of the several Rust-focused solutions that have popped up though.
For a DE to succeed it just has to succeed over lots of alternatives in some features.
GNOME
is widely developed and protected, as it is the default on Fedora (with Redbat) and Ubuntu (Canonical). It is kinda fancy but its main focus seems to be a new “material-ish” simplified and streamlined Desktop.
Just not with transparency, thin animations, blur, 3D Backgrounds, an actually working, goodlooking and existing panel/dock, Apps that actually use your huge top bar used for decorations. Compared to macOS or something.
So you could say its design philosophy is inspired by macOS, but with many different ideas like that “Virtual Desktops or die”. But its basically macOS but less fancy, with a material-ish design like Android 13. I hate both hahaha.
KDE
Then there is KDE, which is really at the edge to look like the extremely outdated look of Windows 10 with these ugly rectangles everywhere, this no-round-corners fetish back in the day, “rectangles are elegant and good UI”. Such a completely weird step back in Style from Windows7, with less colors everywhere.
I have to say though, that Windows11, apart from a lot of stuff like their new design framework for Apps that wastes space, while also in part just already look really fancy, looks way better than KDE 5.
So KDE is now in the position to develop own ideas, but they pretty much go in the same direction as in windows, their new panel changer applet by Niccolo is veery similar to that, and it looks awesome! So I am certain the KDE6 will improve in Design a lot, even though I think I havent yet tried a KDE6 Plasma where projects like Dolphin where already ported to KDE6.
Projects like Dolphin are just great. I found it so strange and new back then to use a file manager with a name XD but funny, that Dolphin, Nemo and Thunar all come from the sea. Dolphin, Ocular, Spectacle, Ark, Kfind, KDE-Partitionmanager, Gwenview (something like Gimp but just for light editing, while still being in an unsafe language with security holes everywhere). These are all just great and unique software projects.
XFCE, MATE, Budgie, Cinnamon
Afaik these are all using GTK, so you could see them as outdated GNOME forks. Maybe thats very mean though, I see that Budgie will soon have Wayland, so I consider it an actively maintained Desktop.
I honestly can’t say much of the other environments, although I guess XFCE is based, had an okayish Design language that is at a solid base between Windows7 and some old Android.
Maybe if you tweak it it gets really modern, but I have looked enough Linux Scoop to know that every DE can look fancy with the amazing Community Designs. Actually Desktops should let random nontechnical Designers that dont understand Git make their Design. Like, no Code touching at all, just images please.
LXDE, LXQt, Window managers
Okay so these are basically energy saving DEs. They dont support lots of stuff simply, with their Design being at Windows XP or earlier. If you dont even have a menubar, that doesnt have to be styled.
So the Desktops maybe for old hardware and energy saving. If they have Wayland, so they can easily be used as the Window Manager of a Desktop, some Distro, Budgie or so, is looking to use an existent Windowmanager as their own. Just not with their own big Design Language, so they can make it “the Budgie Window Manager” without much problems.
I tried Fedora Sway and that was basically broken? My mouse was deduplicating and spamming the screen full with mouse symbols, meanwhile I could look at that… modern and colorful Titlebar, no Viridis or whatever actually thought through Color pallet of child crayon colors on a rectangle Bar with Terminal Font? Who wouldnt love this much “basedness”? But it broke, so yeah uninstalled that.
Cosmic, Hyprland
Now here come new projects, that actually have Designers working on them. Aaand in the Case of Cosmic it is entirely written in a damn safe language.
Okay its fair to say that Hyprland is a cool looking Window Manager, but Cosmic is doing something insane here.
Nearly all these bullshit old buggy File managers are in some C/C++ code, that just always breaks.
These are often 15 years old projects, they said “they cleaned up the packages” just by porting them to Qt6! Imagine what background changes they just left, because they would actually need to cleanup everything?
So Rust. Slint is said to be Qt-like, but not relying on C++, making it an incredible pain to write in Rust as you need to do some OOP translation that I dont understand because I am not in IT.
So Cosmic is doing something crazy and kinda new. Their interface was starting basically as a GNOME extension, quite literally. And there are many people layering just that package on their Fedora Silverblue (or future secureblue?)
But it is still basically imitating GNOME, with GTK support being one of the first GUI Framework integrations to come. They are doing nice material android-y things with their apps, and I imagine they are going in some direction here. Much like Android actually.
So COSMIC is a great beginning, but I think Rewriting something similar to Qt, with loots of frameworks and GUI Interface creation tools would be a statement. Like the Qt Creator, its crazy, a bit like this stupid TinkerCad but actually working and not being Windows-only and blocking Adblockers without even displaying Ads.
It would probably be “Qt stuff + Rust + Translation”, as the Qt people will likely not switch to Rust just like that. But having the core Apps, Kwin, the panel rewritten in Rust, that would be incredible.
Kwin is already working kinda well, but now there is the Cosmic Desktop with whatever WM and they could just reuse that and adapt it a bit.
So yeah, its a big deal for Interface Frameworks to rewrite all their stuff in another, extremely different language.
Android is already free software, and see how far that gets you. The kicker is that you’re tied into their services (with all the data harvesting, targeted advertising and monetisation that that involves).
Yes, because it is permissively open source, not only are these companies free to build what they want - we are entitled to that same right. We therefore created LineageOS and GrapheneOS, and its really great.
There’s also a lot of motivated people getting regular Linux distributions running on mobile devices too, so we have that as well
Apple would sell for 10 but would deny until death that it sold, and still convince you to believe that it didn’t sell.In addition to giving it a “cool” name like DNA Titanium Protection XDR or something like that,
There is already something in the works (that you can technically buy right now if you wanted), and it actively respects your freedom. Granted, as with everything in this ecosystem, its a very slow burn, so it’ll be a while before the software is actually good, but it’s already made massive strides from where it started.
I would say wait a bit and take a look at this later, but i do have one friend daily driving one now to some success (this wasn’t possible a year ago).
That would be great, but you can buy a $20 burner from a gas station that’s more powerful than those phones.
The regular version uses the Allwinner A64 chip which retailed for $5 when it was released… Back in 2015.
The Pro version uses the RK3399S, which is a custom lower binned version of the RK3399. Neither chip was made available retail, but the SK3399 was released in 2016 and only otherwise used in low-end Chromebooks and SBCs.
Sure, but calling them out for not being a $20 burner phone doesnt make sense when you’re comparing that to a developer/development device. This phone specifically isnt meant for everyday consumers. What it is, however, is a signal that there is now a third competitor in the works, and it’s real and tangible.
I’ve been using Linux for 10y and never distro-hopped to solve a problem. Overall I’ve only used 3 distros as daily drivers. IMO you should look into making things work with a distro you like instead of looking for the perfect off the shelf distro.
To build off of the above poster, some things sometimes take some tweaking to make work. When you distro hop you’re really just hopping to a different set of defaults and maybe a few relevant library differences. Learning what to do and how to do it can be daunting but when you get it its brilliant and then you have some idea what you need to do the next time you encounter a similar issue
I second EndeavourOS. Nothing beats the arch wiki and arch user repository, and combining that with the easy and sane install of EndeavourOS makes it an almost perfect distro.
TL;DR: the author needs to do a better job of citing sources and building an argument.
The author’s argument from self-appointed authority tone aside, I dug into the only two verifiable pieces of evidence cited. These are almost impenetrable to the outsider, and even with plenty of coding experience behind me, I’m having to go deep to make sense of any of it. After all, sometimes, bugs and design decisions are the result of a best effort in the situation at hand and not necessarily evidence of negligence, incompetence, or bad architecture. There’s also something to be said for organizing labor, focusing effort on what matters, and triaging the backlog.
The original author really needs to pony up a deeper digest of the project, with many more verifiable links to back up the various quality claims. If anyone is going to take this seriously, a proper postmortem is a better way to go. Cite the version reviewed, link to every flaw you can find, suggest ways to improve things, and keep it blameless. Instead, this reads like cherry picking two whole things on the public bug tracker and then making unsubstantiated claims that’s a part of a bigger pattern.
My personal take on what was cited:
I’m grossly unqualified to assess this codebase as a Wayland or GUI programmer, but work plenty in the Linux space as a cloud practitioner and shell coder.
The first article smells like inadequate QA for cases like placing Wayland programs in the background, which is not typically done for GUI apps under normal usage (IMO).
The second article is a two-line change that I suppose highlights how ill-suited C is for this kind of software. Developer chatter on the MR suggests that the internal API could use some safeguards and sanity checks.
162 open issues, 259 closed, oldest still open is five years old. Not great, but not terrible.
None of this is particularly egregious, considering the age of the project and the use it enjoys today.
You aired my frustrations really well. He spent a lot more time making claims and discussing his own background than demonstrating Wayland’s alleged issues and showing that they’re egregious. It’s an entertaining rant at best, but that doesn’t make his points valid nor does it make anything actionable.
Are you using Firefox within a flatpak perchance ?
There seems to be a bug to it relating to use of bitmap fonts, you can fix the issue by disabling them via a config file in firefox’s fonts: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621915
I have a similar problem, but on Lemmy.zip (Lemmy.world looks fine). However, I am running Fedora Kinoite (immutable), where Firefox is not installed as Flatpak.
So I logged in to check and it told me it needs to download 8 gigs of updates. That sent me into rage and so clean installed everything to be fedora. I have 250 gb of storage locked in limbo because of windows
Sounds like you took your time, got comfortable, found a distro you liked, and generally did it all the right way. Now watch as with each new headline you see about Windows or MS you become happier and happier with your decision. There’s no better advertisement for Linux than the behavior of MS and Windows. 😁
Congrats on dumping Windows. One of us! One of us!
Exactly. Plus I was super creeped out by the news that apparently Microsoft tries to decrypt files I have stored encrypted on my one drive and by default sets up my home directory to be on one drive. What the fuck
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