Another method would be to just mount the remote smb location from your DC using fstab. I use Linux on bare metal, and I added a line to my remote share with noauto, so it doesn’t mount it automatically at boot, since I need to connect to the VPN first, and I don’t need permanent access. When I do need access, I just run mount adm and I’m in.
I guess WSL is best way, but I think you’ll only be able to have the Linux windows like windows windows in the taskbar of windows and launch them with windows
Force people to move to Wayland. Everyone that complains about Wayland breaking their setup knows how to install Xorg anyways. But most Wayland problems are software vendors not giving a shit. Make them give a shit by breaking their shit by default on most setups. 10 years was enough time to make your software work on Wayland. If your software doesn’t work on Wayland by now, then your risk management is shit.
It’s not only software vendors but Wayland itself lacks some crucial features. For me it’s auto-type and screen magnification - both are showstoppers for me.
Not the same as “on demand zooming”, which let’s one stick with a high, native resolution, but zoom in when required (e.g. websites with small text that can’t be zoomed via browser’s font size increase; e.g. referencing some UI stuff during UI design, without having to take a screenshot and pasting + zooming it in e.g. GIMP).
What? Strg + Mousewheel, you can even set the option to only zoom text. At least on firefox. No clue what kind of browser you are using which is not capable of that.
Yeah, that browser zoom. And I too used / use Firefox. I’m not saying these kind of sites are common, but nevertheless I’ve encountered them occasionally. Back then, the most pragmatic workaround was to use desktop zooming of Xfce.
My intention on the previous comment was simply to give some examples of desktop zooming that go beyond the typical accessibility viewpoint (e.g. vision impairment).
Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).
Screen magnification is already present in KDE (Meta + +, Meta + - to zoom in/out). There’s also a magnifier tool (KMag). There may be similar functionalities in other DEs.
My issue is the lack of an overall GUI automation tool, ie, like AutoHotkey. X11 had PyAutoGUI, but there’s no such AIO equivalent for Wayland yet, and the PyAutoGUI devs don’t seem to be interested in Wayland support - it’s neither on their road map, nor have they even answered any Wayland questions on their Github page, which is disappointing. But this isn’t Wayland’s fault, when other tools have shown that automating the GUI is possible, we just need someone to put together a complete package like PyAutoGUI / AHK.
feel free to check out map2, I’m currently working on version 2 which will do lots of the stuff you need when it’s ready, but currently the API might still change and docs are active WIP
still, it can already do most stuff I need it for :)
Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).
These tools work by creating a virtual keyboard so they don’t let you send input to a specific window. The input goes to whatever happens to be focused at the moment. This makes them less reliable than the X11 equivalents and unusable for tasks where you need to guarantee that the right window gets the input.
If that’s the case, then stick to Xorg for now. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s in your best interest for distros to ship with Wayland out of the box.
Do you want software you use to be compatible with Wayland now or later? If your answer is later, then you have to wait for vendors to catch up, even though Wayland got auto type (already exists) and screen magnification by then. This is why I never understood this push against Wayland. People, your only alternative to Wayland is dead and unmaintained. If you push against Wayland as the default option, you only make your transition in the future more painful than it needs to be.
Also, I think it’s still a software vendor problem. If your software can’t work with the only desktop protocol with a future, then you must contribute to the protocol to create a way to make it work. If you don’t do that, then shit happens, your software breaks, and you had 10 years to contribute to the protocol to fix it. Your risk management was once again exceptional at avoiding doing the necessary work to eliminate a long known risk.
People, your only alternative to Wayland is dead and unmaintained. If you push against Wayland as the default option, you only make your transition in the future more painful than it needs to be.
Nobody’s pushing “against Wayland”. I don’t give a shit about Wayland or Xorg. What I care about is having a full-featured, easy to use desktop stack readily available. The “dead” Xorg works perfectly with everything. That’s the bar.
When I get a checkbox on the login screen saying “use Wayland” (or when the distro does it by default) I need everything to work. If everything does not work, I do not use it.
The Wayland choice of pushing complexity onto individual software projects by making them all reinvent a hundred wheels, and onto users by making them hunt down a hundred pieces of software to build a wobbly desktop stack sucks. I have no incentive to take part in this particular rat race.
Nobody’s pushing “against Wayland”. I don’t give a shit about Wayland or Xorg. What I care about is having a full-featured, easy to use desktop stack readily available.
Install Xorg yourself. Don’t make it easily accessible to new Linux users. Software vendors will take note and postpone doing any work for as long as possible.
And you obviously care a lot about Wayland and Xorg.
The “dead” Xorg works perfectly with everything. That’s the bar.
No, it doesn’t. And if it does, then it’s still insecure by design. When I hear statements like these, I get the urge to publish PoC Linux malware code on GitHub that uses X11 specific features to show just how not fine it is.
The Wayland choice of pushing complexity onto individual software projects by making them all reinvent a hundred wheels, and onto users by making them hunt down a hundred pieces of software to build a wobbly desktop stack sucks.
Substitute Wayland for X11 here. Both Wayland and X11 are protocols. X11 is such a lackluster protocol that all implementations died, except that Xorg still has users.
Install Xorg yourself. Don’t make it easily accessible to new Linux users.
New users will drop any distro whose default desktop doesn’t work perfectly and with all the features they want. Linux already has a high enough bar competing with Windows, creating additional artificial hurdles is dumb in the extreme.
And if it does, then it’s still insecure by design.
Security vs convenience has always been a give and take. There’s a cutoff point that users will not cross if the software becomes too inconvenient to use, even if it means greater security. The Wayland stack is currently on the bad side of that line and needs to step over if it wants to see mass adoption.
Substitute Wayland for X11 here. Both Wayland and X11 are protocols. X11 is such a lackluster protocol that all implementations died, except that Xorg still has users.
Nobody cares, all they see is the stack, with Wayland leading the point on the bad decisions.
And you obviously care a lot about Wayland and Xorg.
You are projecting. If this were any other piece of software, say, a text editor that works and does everything you need, and someone came and told you “you must use this new one, it’s the way forward, but oh it doesn’t have all the features you need from a text editor” you would say “thanks but I’ll wait until it’s ready”. But you see no problem in pushing Wayland on people who can’t use it?
Please understand that nobody will ever successfuly push through incomplete software. Not on Linux. There’s nothing you or anybody can do to convince people that incomplete software is complete and usable when it’s not.
New users will drop any distro whose default desktop doesn’t work perfectly and with all the features they want. Linux already has a high enough bar competing with Windows, creating additional artificial hurdles is dumb in the extreme.
Both Wayland and X11 are an artificial hurdle to someone, so at least pick the sane choice with a future.
Security vs convenience has always been a give and take. There’s a cutoff point that users will not cross if the software becomes too inconvenient to use, even if it means greater security. The Wayland stack is currently on the bad side of that line and needs to step over if it wants to see mass adoption.
No, Wayland is doing fine.
Nobody cares, all they see is the stack, with Wayland leading the point on the bad decisions.
Oh no, Wayland isn’t X11. It’s almost as if Wayland isn’t supposed to be 1:1 bug compatible with Xorg.
You are projecting. If this were any other piece of software, say, a text editor that works and does everything you need, and someone came and told you “you must use this new one, it’s the way forward, but oh it doesn’t have all the features you need from a text editor” you would say “thanks but I’ll wait until it’s ready”. But you see no problem in pushing Wayland on people who can’t use it?
I don’t know about what text editors you use, but my text editor doesn’t allow malware to log all keystrokes, tamper with windows of other apps, steal clipboard contents without consent, inject keystrokes into other windows, escalate privileges, and install rootkits that persist OS re-installs using the escalated privileges.
People work on Wayland. Nobody works on Xorg. Alternatives don’t exist.
Please understand that nobody will ever successfuly push through incomplete software. Not on Linux. There’s nothing you or anybody can do to convince people that incomplete software is complete and usable when it’s not.
Do you need a refresher about systemd, pulseaudio, etc.? I’m not in the systemd haters camp, but pulseaudio broke regularly for me. Yet every distro included pulseaudio.
I really wanted Wayland to work for me. I just bought a new ASUS laptop (and ASUS has a great Linux compatibility track record, mind you!), 7th Gen Ryzen+Radeon, all AMD. I figured, let’s use Wayland on this one.
I installed KDE Neon, updated the kernel (some stuff is broken on the LTS kernel, no big deal, easy fix), switched to the Wayland session, everything was fine…until I opened any chromium-based app. Crashed kwin, killed the session completely, it recovered, but in a new session. Switched to X11, everything works. Maybe if I grabbed a newer mesa from a PPA it would work, but:
Crashing the window manager killing the session is awful and doesn’t happen in X11
Chromium shouldn’t crash the compositor at all
Even if it’s AMD’s new graphics drivers being buggy, that still shouldn’t kill the session!
And I know, technically KDE could (and afaik, is) implement session management so that doesn’t happen. But to my knowledge, literally 0 WMs/DEs can recover the session after a compositor crash currently, and that’s a big deal.
If you still want to give Wayland a try, take a look at wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland#Electron. Electron still defaults to X11, even though Electron supports Wayland. It’s a bit annoying to set the command line parameters for apps that bundle Electron, but maybe it works for you.
You know what’s super ironic? I went through this exact thing with X, 25 years ago, when you had to put together a Linux desktop with spit and duct tape.
Wayland promises to be much nicer than X but the way it asks you to put together a working desktop stack yourself is straight out of the '90s.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
10 years was enough time to make your software work on Wayland.
By that logic, one could answer that 15 years was enough time to make Wayland work better than it does… but that would be petty and disingenous.
Desktop stacks are very complex. X.org took 30 years to beat that complexity into a usable shape. Wayland pushed most complexity up the stack and still took 15 years to finally put together a protocol of beta quality.
It will take the rest of the stack however long it will take to build on that protocol. Most of the Linux community are volunteers, and Wayland was and still is work in progress. Nobody in their right mind rushes to write software on top of an unstable protocol.
If Wayland is truly ready I think we will see meaningful stack adoption within the next 5 years. But I don’t think trying to force developers into it will achieve anything.
As for forcing users that’s completely unreasonable. If you’re using XFCE on Nvidia you’ll have to wait for XFCE to get Wayland support and for Wayland to get Nvidia support. Very few people are willing to change their whole desktop stack or able to buy a new graphics card for the sake of… of what? Bringing about the Year of the Linux Desktop?
This is a terrible recommendation and I hope as few people follow it as possible.
People like you are why Linux has a reputation for always being broken; as soon as we get something that works and is stable, we gotta move to the next broken thing.
The same thing will be said about Wayland in 20 years, if it ever reaches feature-parity with X.
Why is the unity is underrated when its what i use right now with Ubuntu Unity and its actually really great experience for my 2021 HP Stream 11 Laptop and i hope you all to share your experiences using the unity de in Debain Ubuntu Arch Fedora Gentoo Opensuse Etc thanks for your Amazing community my Wonderful Friends
A lot of people are saying its the best. Perhaps they are right. I don’t kmow. And I hear it all the time. “It’s the best! It’s the best!”. Who knows. But a lot of great people are saying it. Maybe the best people. That’s just what I hear.
Now that you mention it, Trump sounds a bit like the way FreeBSD people talk about Linux.
“When they send us Linux distributions, they are not sending their best. Linux is an unplanned, undocumented, unusable, crashy mess. Some, I assume, are also good distros.”
Don’t do it. Instead of doing something useful you will be in a constant process of updating and rebooting and dealing with breaking changes and eventually you will give up and switch back to Leap.
I have used TW for years, and never got bothered by a breaking change for more than a day. And that only happened twice.
The only thing that keeps bothering me with Opensuse is their obsession with asking for a root password (and not for yours if you are an administrator, I mean the root user password) for every damn thing. Even installing a fucking user Flatpak requires a fucking root password !
Like I said, last time I checked even a “user” level Flatpak required to use the root password to install. But it may have changed (for the better) since, which is a good thing.
Still, my main point is that most the paranoia of the default OpenSUSE settings is way overboard, and should be toned down quite a lot. A lot of action that would ask for the user password, if not no password at all, requires the root password on OpenSUSE.
I want to use OpenSUSE over Ubuntu or Fedora, I even started contributing back with some package updates here and there, but I just can’t because of those bothering root password prompts everywhere.
I never particularly cared for the Unity desktop. The first few times I tried it, there were hardware incompatibilities, slow performance, and crashing. Gnome3 is a complicated mess. I prefer to keep it simple. XFCE is fine for me.
I still think KDE is a much smarter desktop environment and much more light or fast. I never liked GNOME 3 and Unity had many performance issues in the past. I also tried GNOME 3 recently and still, I needed many plugins to make it good and usable and was still lacking much stuff, while on KDE works all perfectly. I’m waiting for Plasma 6 now. :D
I miss Unity. It never got the love it deserved from a praise nor development standpoint. My typical Gnome desktop typically ends up being a quasi-Unity layout. I need to spin up the latest Ubuntu Unity spin for nostalgia’s sake.
Recently got a used X270 for my kid, for school. It came with windows 11, but I put Ubuntu Budgie on it.
It cost me about 220 USD in my currency. Very nice computer.
Not much related, but I want to chime in to express my gratitude for what I consider the most underrated piece of software in the FOSS ecosystem. Better known hex editors pale in comparison to wxHexEditor in terms of features and user interface. I suggest you to tweak the colors for better viewing (I can share my configuration file) and to upgrade to the latest unstable revision because many important fixes landed since the last stable version.
Unity started with pretty awful performance (much like GNOME 3) and coincided with some infamous decisions on the part of Canonical, namely that whole business with the Amazon integration, so it’s permanently tainted in the minds of many. It also meant that the largest distro in town was suddenly using a desktop that was much less inviting to newcomers than the familiar GNOME 2.
I’m glad it’s being kept alive as it does have a unique vibe to it, but I always found the workflow a bit awkward and much prefer GNOME for something modern and xfce or MATE for when I want something traditional.
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