I let a friend try out Linux after I’ve been using it for years and they were shocked how much easier some things are. I think the idea of throwing them into a like Windows distro is the wrong direction. I’m ready POP OS’s new desktop whenever it comes out.
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 don’t like and pretending it’s the end of the world. This isn’t 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 wouldn’t be a problem.
My pet peeve is when people complain someone else’s free labor isn’t being done in the way they’d prefer. First of all, it’s 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 one’s forcing you to use it. If you don’t want to, stick to X11. I’ve been testing wayland for a few months now and it’s fine. It does most of I want it to. I don’t need fancy fractional scaling, adaptive refresh rates, or whatever other fancy stuff people complain about that isn’t there. It shows my windows, allows screen-share, and… that’s it. Only thing missing for me is scriptability.
I’m 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, you’re completely correct. Nobody who could theoretically prevent something they don’t like is not entitled to their dislike, duh!
do you have anything to back this up other than a fuzzy claim of authority? so far when I see people say things like this they’re always talking about a handful of since fixed vulnerabilities early on in the project
Every time I update my flatpak apps I get a warning about deprecated libraries. I don’t think flatpak is the issue but rather apps being able to not update really old libraries that could have security patches available. Does anyone know of a way to force these old libraries to update?
On Flatpak? Probably not. You update those libraries, even manually, and things will most probably break.
One of the many reasons I don’t like Flatpak. You really don’t have any control over how these packages are delivered. What the package maintainer did, that is it. But there’s a new version. Nope, not if the package maintainer doesn’t update.
IMO the biggest problem is simply that not enough devices are sold with it.
The amount of people who want to/can be arsed to/even know they can install an OS on their PC is pretty small. And even then, most that can will just stick to what they know (this is obviously part of the mindset issue that you speak of).
If mainstream devices were sold with Linux on them, it would get over that hurdle, and also get over the daunting hurdle of “ok I want to switch to Linux, what’s a good distro?” hurdle, to which people online will say everything from Debian to fucking Arch Linux.
Chromebooks (bastardised though they may be) and the Steam Deck prove that Linux isn’t unviable. People just won’t install it of their own volition.
And even then, most that can will just stick to what they know (this is obviously part of the mindset issue that you speak of).
It’s the change. People hate change, in general, not just in IT.
IT workers are used to frequent changes and they usually adapt quickly, so it’s not such a huge problem for them. But, most people aren’t used to change, they like things pretty much static.
If mainstream devices were sold with Linux on them, it would get over that hurdle, and also get over the daunting hurdle of “ok I want to switch to Linux, what’s a good distro?” hurdle, to which people online will say everything from Debian to fucking Arch Linux.
I’ve seen people recommend Arch for a beginner, that’s a terrible choice… it will drive potential users away. I usually recommend Mint for beginners, LMDE mostly nowadays, ince Ubuntu isn’t what it used to be and that will most probably leave a skewed picture to the user of what Linux is. Yes, there are tools that make things easier, but under the hood there is no UI, it’s all commands. You wanna jump in, go right ahed. You don’t feel OK with that, that’s fine as well, use whatever GUI tools you like, LMDE has plenty of them.
Chromebooks and the Steam Deck prove that Linux isn’t unviable. People just won’t install it of their own volition.
Yep, pretty much the truth. This basically means that if, oh let’s say, Debian cut a deal with some laptop/PC manufacturers, Linux could actually be used by many users.
And even then, most that can will just stick to what they know (this is obviously part of the mindset issue that you speak of).
It’s the change. People hate change, in general, not just in IT.
IT workers are used to frequent changes and they usually adapt quickly, so it’s not such a huge problem for them. But, most people aren’t used to change, they like things pretty much static.
If mainstream devices were sold with Linux on them, it would get over that hurdle, and also get over the daunting hurdle of “ok I want to switch to Linux, what’s a good distro?” hurdle, to which people online will say everything from Debian to fucking Arch Linux.
I’ve seen people recommend Arch for a beginner, that’s a terrible choice… it will drive potential users away. I usually recommend Mint for beginners, LMDE mostly nowadays, since Ubuntu isn’t what it used to be and that will most probably leave a skewed picture to the user of what Linux is. Yes, there are tools that make things easier, but under the hood there is no UI, it’s all commands. You wanna jump in, go right ahed. You don’t feel OK with that, that’s fine as well, use whatever GUI tools you like, LMDE has plenty of them.
Chromebooks and the Steam Deck prove that Linux isn’t unviable. People just won’t install it of their own volition.
Yep, pretty much the truth. This basically means that if, oh let’s say, Debian cut a deal with some laptop/PC manufacturers, Linux could actually be used by many users.
From personal experience working in a Microsoft ecosystem, it’s mostly a matter of being able to hire the right people.
There is a near-infinite source of IT workers that have some expertise with Microsoft software and services. And those kinds of numbers simply don’t exist for the Linux world, especially with all the different configurations out there.
Medium-sized organizations have to employ a strategy of throwing enough idiots at a problem in order to keep things running. This also creates some of the issues they need the idiots for because no one has detailed knowledge of how things work.
My attempts at proposing a linux-based application server have been met with all sorts of “but our domain policy”, “we can’t guarantee continuity”, “none of my people know how to admin this stuff” type responses.
It definitely is a matter of mindset, but there is also a big commitment to make if switching systems to Linux. And that is a choice managers will only make if the benefits are clearly illustrated in a businesscase.
Medium-sized organizations have to employ a strategy of throwing enough idiots at a problem in order to keep things running.
Lol 🤣, that’s one way to say it 😂.
And I meant more as in computers for personal use. I completely get why most things are MS centered in the workplace, and that’s fine. If the workflow requires it, there is nothing wrong with that.
It’s pretty easy for me to use Linux at work thanks to VMs. But if you want to also avoid using windows or all the other Microsoft 365 stuff, that’s more difficult.
Causally recommending linux and shutting down inane tech support questions aren’t the same thing. If I get asked: “X feature stopped working in the newest macOS. What do I do?” I tell them the truth: “I switched to linux to get the feature back.”
“reduces fragmentation” wtf lol. If it wasn’t 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 it’s true that Wayland adoption kills obscure X11 window managers, Wayland adoption also spawns a wide range of obscure Wayland compositors. Think hyprland, wayfire… It’s 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 won’t 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 I’m at it. Don’t get me wrong, I do want to eventually contribute to Void’s repos in some way, but when I have time for that. And right now, I don’t 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 won’t accept it because it doesn’t do version numbering when doing releases… 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 you’re running. So, I just post those obscure or out of date software templates on GH and other places.
I’ve also submitted a few times in the official repo… for things I know that I use reglarly and can maintain. Basically, most of them don’t have that many updates, like once or twice a year, so that’s why I opted to submit and maintain them, lol 😂.
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 Wayland’s 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 “common parts” 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 don’t. So wouldn’t 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 don’t see how the Wayland system is more adverse to diversity of implementations than X
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 it’s very unfortunate considering graphics cards are so expensive to replace nowadays so if you already have an Nvidia card then you’re kinda screwed.
Flatpak packages still suck at integration without breaking something in the core app. They’re really great for bleeding edge and cross distro support tho.
Wayland still can’t do all the cool tricks X11 can, so it’s not like it’s 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.
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