X11 is like a big dilapidated house. It doesn’t work very well anymore and is difficult to maintain.
Wayland is new modern house. Smaller and more efficient, but missing some amenities that the old house had that some people still want, like a wood burning stove.
Most features missing right now (not all) are against the Wayland philosophy, this doesn’t mean that you won’t get anything but that it needs a “modern era replacement”. Though applications will need to support the replacement. This is usually for good reasons.
The prime example is screen recording. Allowing any program to read and write the entire screen is objectively wrong, no matter what the big time X11 fans say. But there is a replacement: pipewire. Pipewire is extremely advanced and featureful, and it’s more secure because it allows the system and the user to audit who is reading the screen and what part. The problem is that programs need to support pipewire for screen recording, but the main culprits are niche screen recorders (OBS is the best anyway, and it supports it) and proprietary video call software like discord (zoom supports it), which is silly because for electron apps it’s literally a matter of using a version less than 3 years old an adding a flag.
Suspiciously all current LTS expire on Dec 2026 there is nothing planned ahead of this. And 3y for 6.6 is the shortest of any LTS I remember. My bet is Linus retiring then LF taking over everything.
Ubuntu is already immune to the 2038 bug. The Linux kernel even supports using a 64 bit time_t on 32 bit systems now. Of course some poorly written software could still be affected, but that’s not the fault of the kernel or operating system.
The 2038 bug will certainly cause problems in some embedded systems that still use a 32 bit time_t if they are still running by then.
It's not poorly written software if it's is old. Likewise the y2k bug is often declared as bad programming, but at the time the software with the y2k bug was written memory was measured in kilobytes and a lot of accounting software and banking software was written in a time when 64k was the norm. Oh, and I'll tell you now I know of at least some accounting software that is based on code written for the 8088 and has been wrapped and cross compiled so many times now it's unrecognisable. But I know that 40 year old code is still there.
So 2 digits for year was best practice at the time and at the time software vulnerable to the 2038 bug 32bit epoch dates was the best practice.
Now, software written today doing the same, could of course be considered bad, but it's not a good blanket statement.
I mean, Ghost Recon Wildlands which came out in 2017 for example has save dates written as a 32-bit date so it’s prone to the 2038 bug, I set the date to 2040 and tested a bunch of software and while you can save the date overflows and shows as 1969. I bet there are still people using 32-bit dates even if unintentionally.
I mean, technically you could use unsigned 32bit if you don't need to handle dates before 1970. But yes, the best course of action now is to use 64bits. The cost is pretty much nothing on modern systems.
I'm just cautious of people judging software from a time with different constraints and expectations, with the current yardstick.
I also wonder what the problem will be. People playing ghost recon in 2038 are going to be "retro" gaming it. There should be an expectation of such problems. Would it prevent you loading or saving the file is the question?
Nope, saving and loading works on that game (and pretty much every other game I tested), it’s just you lose the date display in-game so you don’t know when you really last saved.
No new version will be released until Cosmic is ready.
Edit: I don’t intend to badmouth S76 here. I love PopOS, it’s the distro that made me a Linux fulltimer. Cosmic looks great so far. However the last major release of PopOS was in early 2022.
I guess it depends how one defines “update” versus “version”. Again, please don’t take what I’m saying as criticism of what you guys are doing, because PopOS is great — I just happen to have a personality better suited to rolling-release distros. Pop is what I usually recommend to first-time Linux users though.
I’m defining it the same way that Mint and Ubuntu is here. Which is when they release a new version of their ISO. We are currently on 22.04.37. Release date January of 2024. There are substantial changes since the first ISO build of 22.04
There are new versions released every two or three weeks. I’m about to release Linux 6.6.8 with Mesa 23.3.2. We have Pipewire 1.0.0 and NVIDIA 545. ISOs are regularly rebuilt with our latest updates.
I am still actively maintaining Pop!_OS. COSMIC has not changed that aspect of my job. Just within the last week I packaged Linux 6.6.8, Mesa 23.3.2, Just 1.22, Rust 1.75.0, and updated Popsicle’s dependencies to fix a bindgen build error with recent versions of Clang. We have a systemd update that was packaged today, and I’ll be doing another linux-firmware backport soon. So I don’t understand why you’d think it is stagnant. We’re even shipping Pipewire 1.0.0 by default, which Ubuntu hasn’t yet done in the latest version. People usually complain that we update too often.
Stagnant was probably the wrong choice of word. Perhaps “stable” (in the Debian sense) would be more apt, and that isn’t for everybody. I think you will see a HUGE influx once Cosmic launches.
It’s not stable in the Debian sense. We’ve always had rolling release updates for the system base; and people often complain about regressions in Linux, Pipewire, Mesa, and NVIDIA updates. I get them packaged shortly after they’re released. As long as they pass QA tests in the System76 hardware lab, they get released within a week.
Well, there must still be a reason that people are going to other distros… I don’t think Pop has any inherent problems (unlike Manjaro for example) so perhaps the average user (counting myself in there) simply considers those under-the-hood changes less appealing than new GUI stuff, especially when the demographic is gamers. Things like Cosmic’s improved tiling and the built-in theming support will be a major attraction, I think.
You are misunderstanding the data. It is not the number of users, but a percent of posts to ProtonDB, which only applies to PC gamers. There can be a disproportionately larger number of reports from those who need to spend time tweaking their system as opposed to using it, or that are particularly vocal about sharing their tweaks.
The total number of users playing games on Linux is rising each year. Pop!_OS was the first OS that a lot of people tried a few years ago, and so you’ll see a lot more diversity in choice now. People who are new to Linux, yet particularly heavily invested in it, tend to like to try out a lot of different distributions in the following years.
I don’t want to step on your workflow too much since it somehow seems to work for you but your main issue stems from the fact that you clearly don’t work with your server as if it actually was a server.
You shouldn’t really have a desktop interface running there in the first place (let alone as root and then using it as a regular user). You should ask yourself what it actually solves for you and be open to trying different (and more standard) solutions to what you’re trying to achieve.
It’d probably consist of less clicking and using the CLI a bit more, but for stuff like file management you can still easily use https://linux.die.net/man/1/mc.
If you need terminal sessions that keep scrollback and don’t stop when you disconnect you should learn to use tmux or screen or something like that. But then again if you’re running actual software in there then you should probably use a service (daemon) for that.
As for whether it’s a security issue, yeah it most definitely is. Just like it’s a security issue to run literally any networked application as root. Security isn’t black and white and there are trade offs to be made but most people wouldn’t consider what you’re doing a reasonable tradeoff.
I had actually moved from a fully CLI server to one with a full desktop when I upgraded from a single board computer to x86. The issue is that it’s not just a NAS, but I regularly use it to offload long operations (moving, copying, or compressing files, mostly) so I don’t need to use my PC for those. To do that I just remote into it and type in the command, then I can turn my PC off or do whatever without affecting the operation. So in a way it’s a second PC that also happens to be a server for my other machines.
I use screen occasionally, and I used to use it a lot more when it was CLI only, but I find it really unwieldy due to how it manages multiple active terminals where you have to type in the ID of each screen to go back into it, and also because it refuses to scroll even when run in a terminal emulator that supports scrolling, where it just cycles between recent commands when you move the scroll wheel.
Not trying to make excuses, just trying to explain my reasoning. I know it’s bad practice and none of these are things I’d do if I was managing an actual production server, but since it’s only accessible from my LAN I tend to be a lot more lax with it.
I’m wondering if I could benefit from some kind of virtualized setup that separates the server stuff while still letting me remote into a desktop on the same machine for doing stuff, or if I can get away with just remoting into not the root user. Though I’ve never used a hypervisor and have no idea how to so I’m not sure how well that would go, since the well-known open source ones like Xen seem really technical and really feels like something not meant to be used outside an actual data centre.
KVM is awesome. It is the core of Proxmox which is my preferred way to manage VMs and LXC containers now. I used to run debian+KVM+virt-manager or cockpit but Proxmox does all the noodling setup for me and then just works.
Sorry, this is very much a PEBKAC issue. This is a excerpt from my tmux config:
<span style="color:#323232;"># Start windows and panes at 1, not 0
</span><span style="color:#323232;">set -g base-index 1
</span><span style="color:#323232;">setw -g pane-base-index 1
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># Use Alt-arrow keys without prefix key to switch panes
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bind -n M-Left select-pane -L
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bind -n M-Right select-pane -R
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bind -n M-Up select-pane -U
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bind -n M-Down select-pane -D
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># Shift arrow to switch windows
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bind -n S-Left previous-window
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bind -n S-Right next-window
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># No delay for escape key press
</span><span style="color:#323232;">set -sg escape-time 0
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># Increase scrollback buffer size from 2000 to 50000 lines
</span><span style="color:#323232;">set -g history-limit 50000
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># Increase tmux messages display duration from 750ms to 4s
</span><span style="color:#323232;">set -g display-time 4000
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># Bind pane creation keys to reuse current directory
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bind % split-window -h -c "#{pane_current_path}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bind '"' split-window -v -c "#{pane_current_path}"
</span>
I hope the comments are self explanatory.
Scrolling works with Ctrl+b Page Up/Down. There are other shortcuts, but this is probably the most obvious. q to quit scrolling.
Ctrl+b d to detach from a session. tmux a to attach. As always, many options are available to have many named sessions running simultaneously, but that is for a later time.
I see. In that case you should really try tmux; I didn’t vibe with screen either but I find tmux quite usable.
For the most part I just open several terminal windows/tabs on my local machine and remote with each one to the server, and I use tmux only when I explicitly need to keep something running. Since that’s usually just one thing I can use like two tmux commands and don’t need anything else.
Oh and for stuff like copying and such I’d use rsync instead of primitive cp so that in case it gets interrupted I only copy what’s needed.
I wouldn’t bother with virtualization and such; you’d only complicate things for yourself. Try to keep it simple but do it properly: learn some command line basics and you’ll see that in a year it’ll become second nature.
I use Linux (Arch actually) as my daily driver - I’m the MD of a small IT business in the UK. I have at least one employee who is asking me to create a Linux standard deployment to replace Windows because they don’t like it anymore - W11 is quite divisive.
For a corp laptop/desktop you might need Exchange email - so that might be Evolution with EWS. You’ll want “drive letters” - Samba, Winbind and perhaps autofs. You’ll need an office suite - Libre Office works fine. There’s this too: cid-doc.github.io for more MS integration - if that’s your bag.
I often see people getting whizzed up about whether LO can compete with MSO. I wrote a finite (yes, finite) capacity scheduler for a factory in MS Excel, back in 1995/6 - it involved a lot of VBA and a mass of checksums etc. I used to teach word processing and DTP (Quark, Word, Ventura and others). LO cuts it. It gets on my nerves when I’m told that LO isn’t capable by someone who is incapable of fixing a widow or orphan or for whom leading and kerning are incomprehensible.
This may be a controversial opinion but I would rather use the web version of Outlook than Evolution. I have been trying to use Evolution since the Ximian days but I was never really happy with it. I gave up on it in favour of web Outlook a couple of years ago.
I remember back in 2017, I didn’t really need any big desktop apps anymore. All I used was Salesforce, Netsuite, O365, Postman… I asked my company to just give me a Chromebook. Now I hate Chromebooks and I could very much do my job on a Linux distro mainly using web apps if needed.
My IT dept would never allow it because they can’t install security software on it. Obviously I’d be pretty safe from malware, but they’d have to trust that I set up firewalls and password protection because they couldn’t enforce a group policy, and their data loss prevention tools wouldn’t work.
Not as “safe” as you think in that regard (I use arch btw), the reason they don’t want it is because you lose control as the administrator. Once everyone is running some flavour of Linux and people report problems, guess who’s gotta look at it? The IT department. It’s a management nightmare compared to windows.
I solved that by social engineering our IT to join my “Windows” computer into the domain, which was actually just a Windows VM. They didn’t notice, and I’m free to Linux away.
A lot of my work involves writing scripts for systems I do not control, using as light a touch as is realistically possible. I know for a fact Python is NOT installed on many of my targets, and it doesn’t make sense to push out a whole Python environment of my own for something as trivial as string manipulation.
awk is super powerful, but IMHO not powerful enough to justify its complexity, relative to other languages. If you have the freedom to use Python, then I suggest using that for anything advanced. Python skills will serve you better in a wider variety of use cases.
I’ve been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:
Some games didn’t work right a few years ago. (Under Proton or otherwise. Haven’t had issues for a while)
RenderDoc, a vital bit of graphics debugging software, works poorly on Wayland. (Easy fix is to force X11 for QT via QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb)
Had some issues with mixed integrated/NVidia graphics on a laptop I was using for a demo once.
Covering or otherwise hiding a Wayland window blocks a program’s graphics thread. This is sometimes problematic.
VR development had issues a while ago? (This was for work. It just… stopped working at some point. Dunno if it was a Linux, SteamVR, or Unity3D issue. My work machine mostly runs Windows 10 now as a result. Oh well.)
Screen recording didn’t work well a while ago… (continued)
Overall, it’s just worked great though!
My anti-complaints:
Mixed refresh rates on monitors “just works” now. (I have a 1080@144 for gaming, and a 4k@60 for work)
Video frames don’t have half drawn content. (ex: when resizing windows), except on XWayland stuff
Video tearing has basically disappeared.
Video timing issues seem to be improved.
Input handling for keyboard layouts has improved.
Screen recording in Wayland is way better than it ever was on X11 now. I do this a lot to share gamedev stuff I’m working on.
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