People complaining about something opensource not doing what they want it to do: dudes/dudettes, if you want to maintain X11, go right ahead. Or if you want it maintained, pay somebody to do it. But stop this incessant whining about opensource devs choosing a direction you donāt like and pretending itās the end of the world. This isnāt some faceless, megacorp with closed-source shit you have no control over.
If all the people complaining about wayland either put their energy to positive stuff like making wayland better or making X11 better, this wouldnāt be a problem.
My pet peeve is when people complain someone elseās free labor isnāt being done in the way theyād prefer. First of all, itās entitled. Secondly, complaining on social media rarely if ever accomplishes anything in FOSS land.
Counterpoint, if all of the people advocating for wayland actually worked on improving wayland to a usable state instead maybe people would actually want to use it.
No oneās forcing you to use it. If you donāt want to, stick to X11. Iāve been testing wayland for a few months now and itās fine. It does most of I want it to. I donāt need fancy fractional scaling, adaptive refresh rates, or whatever other fancy stuff people complain about that isnāt there. It shows my windows, allows screen-share, andā¦ thatās it. Only thing missing for me is scriptability.
Iām not advocating for Wayland nor X11, just saying to stop shitting on devs who give a lot of free time to write opensource code that none of us have to pay for. All we have to do is be nice - maybe report bugs, maybe maybe donate if we have the means.
Good thing the world is that simple, youāre completely correct. Nobody who could theoretically prevent something they donāt like is not entitled to their dislike, duh!
āreduces fragmentationā wtf lol. If it wasnāt for flatpak making it easy to run proprietary / obscure apps on my weirdo little distro (Void Linux, one of the few remaining non-systemd distros) I would have switched to something mainstream like Debian long ago. People are gonna go with the distro that supports (i.e. has non-broken packages for) the apps they use. Having a cross-platform package manager makes it easier for small independent distros to exist and be useful, not harder.
EDIT: And while itās true that Wayland adoption kills obscure X11 window managers, Wayland adoption also spawns a wide range of obscure Wayland compositors. Think hyprland, wayfireā¦ Itās by far not all Gnome and KDE! If anything, we can expect more people making Wayland compositors as hobby projects, if Waylands claims about a simpler codebase are to be believed.
I use flatpak because I enjoy the sandbox as well. Nice to know that a zeroday in some obscure internet-enabled program wonāt automatically grant the hacker access to my entire home directory. And as for xbps-src, I might as well submit my package to the official repos while Iām at it. Donāt get me wrong, I do want to eventually contribute to Voidās repos in some way, but when I have time for that. And right now, I donāt have time to essentially become a package maintainer just to be able to use the apps that I need to use.
Yeah, but not everything gets accepted. Like, for example, I use Viber and they wonāt accept it because it doesnāt do version numbering when doing releasesā¦ and you have no idea when they will update. Basically, short of unpacking the deb and checking the version in the ELF binary, there is no way to know which version youāre running. So, I just post those obscure or out of date software templates on GH and other places.
Iāve also submitted a few times in the official repoā¦ for things I know that I use reglarly and can maintain. Basically, most of them donāt have that many updates, like once or twice a year, so thatās why I opted to submit and maintain them, lol š.
If anything, we can expect more people making Wayland compositors as hobby projects, if Waylands claims about a simpler codebase are to be believed.
They are not. Wayland compositors have to do a lot more of the same thing in every compositor than window managers ever had to. So many in fact that their whole central design idea has to be corrected for by everyone using wlroots to implement those common parts to get anywhere anyway which means wayland compositors in other languages without wlroots bindings are less likely.
have to do a lot more of the same thing in every compositor than window managers ever had to
Yes, but is that not entirely expected? As far as I understand, compositors are complete implementations of Waylandās display server specification, whereas window managers are just a helper program that, well, manages windows, while Xorg does the heavy lifting required to fully implement the X Window System protocol. So the only real difference that I see is that, in the X world, the ācommon partsā are managed by a separate process (Xorg), whereas in the Wayland world, they are managed by a separate library (wlroots). So a hobbyist developer trying to make a window manager in some obscure language would need to figure out how to communicate with Xorg in that language, whereas a developer trying to make a compositor in some obscure language would need to write wlroots bindings for that language. Maybe I am just ignorant, but those seem like comparable efforts to me.
And lastly, in the X world, the only (widespread) implementation of the X Window System protocol is Xorg, but, in the Wayland world, there are compositors that use wlroots, and those that donāt. So wouldnāt that alone indicate more fragmentation / diversity? Sure, there are more X window managers than Wayland compositors out there, but X11 has also existed for longer. In short, I donāt see how the Wayland system is more adverse to diversity of implementations than X
Flatpak is good for diversity. Users donāt need to worry about whether the obscure distro they want to use has the software they want in its repos. If a distro supports flatpak it will work with most popular software out of the box.
Having run PostmarketOS on an old Samsung Galaxy tablet and now Arch on PineTab 2, Flatpak often works better than the native package manager. Especially with Wayland, many packages just work including touchscreen.
I may be misunderstanding flatpack, though I do understand the draw of all dependencies in one package.
One of the big things that drew me to linux some years ago was āoh, you donāt have to reinstall every dependency 101 times in a packaged exe so the system stays much smaller?ā As well as in-place updates without a restart. It resulted in things being much much less bloated, or maybe that was just placebo.
Linux seems to be going in the flatpack direction which seems to just be turning it into a windows-like system. That and nix-like systems where everything is containerized and restarting is the only thing that applies updates seems to be negating those two big benefits.
I have recently started using KDE and so far i like it after years of XFCE on slower pc. And every now and then I think about switching to some debian based distro but AUR spoiled me and now I am too lazy. Its great that with my setuo I can change distros and have working OS in under an hour with all my software already setup.
I think it is unusual. As a software engineer who has a large circle of friends, loads of them know I use Linux, but literally no one cares or is curious about knowing more. And honestly Iām not interested in explaining. We talk about and do other things lol. I sometimes talk about differences and news about both with those who have jobs or interests closer to the IT business, and we have a short conversation about those news, but nobody asks me about Linux, and especially not Windows. Itās not interesting.
X11 is already dead, and it will not become more or less usable it will always stay the way itās and wayland will gwt better. thatās the difference and flatpak is just an option it doesnāt try to replace whatās already availible. spreading distrust and miainformation about these softwares doesnāt help
How do you mean that? Iāve been using X11 for like 17 years. i3 uses X11, and I will most likely not use another WM if I can help it. Itās perfect for me. X11 is available in the core repositories of all the big distros.
Just because they donāt do full releases doesnāt mean it isnāt developed anymore. They switched to updating modules individually, with three updates made this month. Doesnāt sound very abandoned to me.
I actually used Sway for a while. Canāt remember why I switched back though. What would X11 āgoing end-of-lifeā entail? Not being distributed/packaged anymore? Is there an official timeline for that or something?
Essentially theyāre not doing feature work on the core codebase. Iām not sure if thatās true or not, but the packaging of it wouldnāt be up to the developers but the distro maintainers.
Iāll say that while it still has features that Wayland doesnāt itās not dead, it doesnāt get updates yes but it still used by a lot of people for the fact that Wayland just doesnāt support some stuff that x11 does. Great example I have is TeamViewer and Nvidia+KDE
While TeamViewer is definitely neglected I use it often on Wayland and it works well actually!
In the past year or so it doesnāt shut down correctly. But the core functionality works well.
Iāve been experimenting with Rustdesk as an alternative because I doubt theyāll update the Linux client anytime soon. The Windows version looks like an entirely different application at this point
In terms of feature parity. I believe the only thing left is global hotkeys, which hyprland proved it can be done.
I hate comments that are like āoh if only Linux could run Whateverā etc. You can have more than one computer (or partition), and you can have more than one OS. Windows isnāt going to divorce you if you spend time with Linux.
It works great too. Day to day Iāll be building Linux code, running IntelliJ under X, installing docker containers and doing other stuff all from a Windows desktop.
No, but it sure is annoying having to switch in the middle of doing something especially when youāre working. (Also, thereās that pesky thing that happened to me as well where windows doesnāt play nice with the Linux boot partition and fucks it up) So thereās always going to be a main os. If youāre fortunate enough you can use an old laptop for windows. Or, if your computer is powerful enough run an windows VM. For me, Gnome Boxes offered a really easy to use experience of running windows. It worked out of the box, no special tweaks.
I installed Garuda on my wifeās gaming machine last autumn, dual boot with Windows. I havenāt seen her using Windows since then, and she said she hasnāt. She loves it btw, says, even better graphics in some games. And KDE is an eye candy anyways.
Flatpak packages still suck at integration without breaking something in the core app. Theyāre really great for bleeding edge and cross distro support tho.
Wayland still canāt do all the cool tricks X11 can, so itās not like itās really being forced upon anyone beyond X11 losing on potential major updates which is unlikely.
DEs are willing to switch to Wayland given that it is either equal or superior to X11 which is still not the case for several scenarios and applications.
Exactly my POV. Do all the things X11 can, and I have no problem switching whatsoever.
Why did no one had any issues switching from PulseAudio to PipeWire? Because it was simply better. It could do everything PulseAudio could, plus a lot more. It was backwards compatible (with plugins of course) and there were practically very little issues with it at the point at which distros and users decided to switch. It was a finished product.
Ah yes, simplicity. MBR, with all its limitations had one killer feature: it was extremely simple.
UEFI, as powerful as it is, is the opposite of simple. Many moving parts, so many potential failure points. Unfortunately, it seems like modern software is just that: more complex and prone to failure.
True, butā¦ When MBR Grub drops to rescue or doesnāt appear at all, itās not only difficult (at least for newbies) but somewhat random if you can actually boot a given OS. With EFI Grub, Iāve often managed to boot using BIOS boot override to launch a usable Grub configuration.
Actually grub 0.x series had much more useful rescue shell tab completion than the latest release. You could easily list all boot devices, partitions, and even filesystems and their contents. All from the rescue shell. Consequently, you could boot into Linux and reinstall grub in the MBR to fix it. All that without using a boot CD/USB! Good luck doing that with the latest version of grub and UEFI.
Also getting into the BIOS on legacy firmware was also very simple. On most machines itās the three finger salute followed by either F1, Delete or rarely F11 or F12.
The boot process was simple, and the BIOS had just one simple task: load and execute the first 512 bytes of the disk that was designated as the boot device. Thatās it.
Asus --> Del - Enter BIOS, F8 - Boot menu (very confusing since Windows also uses F8 for the recovery mode boot menu, so you have to press F8, then when the boot menu appears, chose the boot device, then have one hand on Enter and the other on F8 again, so that you hit Enter and start tapping like crazy on F8 to enter the rescue mode menuā¦ annoying as hell)
GigaByte --> Del or F2 - Enter BIOS, F12 - Boot menu, Alt + F10 - Copy main BIOS to backup BIOS
MSI --> Del or F2 - Enter BIOS, F11 - Boot menu
ASRock --> Del or F2 - Enter BIOS, F11 or F10 - Boot menu
Biostar --> Del - Enter BIOS, F9 - Boot menu
Intel --> F2 - Enter BIOS, F10 or F12 - Boot menu
I used to remember some of the brand name PCs as well, but time has gotten the best of me š¤·.
The boot process was simple, and the BIOS had just one simple task: load and execute the first 512 bytes of the disk that was designated as the boot device. Thatās it.
This is actually what I love about MBR nowadays. Itās simple enough so no one wants to mess with it and render the rig unbootable and obscure enough so no one (MS) actually checks if there is anything there that might trigger warnings (non-MS code).
I was just in a position to buy a top of the line video card. Even thought Nvidia still outperforms AMD at the top end I never even considered them an option.
I agree but itās very unfortunate considering graphics cards are so expensive to replace nowadays so if you already have an Nvidia card then youāre kinda screwed.
Itās about everything. Computers, phones, the computer that makes your car work. Every bit of electronics that boots - that probably includes your smoke detector and oven
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