What they are talking about is that some of the Wayland compositors rely on things like libinput and libdrm which are Linux specific.
This is not “Wayland” really but, from the point of view of a regular user, it may as well be. As the OP points out, there is no /usr/bin/Wayland
It is not really a great criticism although it must be frustrating for the BSD folks and others. Of course, the answer like always is to contribute. Nothing stopping anybody from taking wlroots ( or whatever ) and adding abstractions that make it more portable.
Non-Linux operating systems have already added Wayland support ( like Haiku ). If I had the time, I would add it to SerenityOS myself.
Actually, if I had the time, I might write a WaylandServer for X. First, it would be funny. Second, the people that do not want to move could stay on X forever even when everything stops supporting it. I would have to make sure that my WaylandServer could run XWayland of course.
It is a tiling Wayland compositor that is only a couple of megs in size. On Oasis Linux, I launched into Velox, opened a terminal, and checked the memory usage. It was under 30 MB of RAM. That is for the whole system!
That experience made me think differently about Wayland.
There was only one Xorg. For me, the evidence that it was big and complicated is best expressed by the fact that, over decades, the number of projects that competed to provide X had dwindled to one. There was loads of unhappiness with it and yet, there were no forks. Why?
Now Wayland. There are new Wayland compositors all the time now. I just saw one yesterday—Louvre. The basis for Velox above is SWC. There is Wayfire. There is Weston. There is of course wlroots. And both KDE and GNOME have made their own. I think somebody even wrote one for Haiku! For me, this is evidence in itself that making a Wayland compositor is easier than implementing X.
It also means that all these Wayland compositors can compete with each other and drive each other. It means that I, as the end user, can pick a super stripped down version when that is what I want and an all-singing, all-dancing version when that is what I want instead. In some situations I will be happy with, and thankful for, Velox and in other situations I will want GNOME.
It is taking a long time and the journey has not been smooth. That said, I am becoming quite confident that we are in a much better place. For normal uses, Wayland is in a good place now. The level of innovation is very high. Dev can start to shift from the basics to the extras. I fully expect that we are heading into an exciting time on the Linux desktop.
Red Hat created Fedora specifically to be the “community” distro. There used to just be Red Hat which tried to be both free and paid. Now they have Fedora and RHEL.
Red Hat releases all their own software as GPL. They are one of the few players releasing new and important GPL software. As you state, they employ and pay people to spend most of their time building an emphatically free and community based distro. I cannot think of a company that does more for Open Source.
When is the last time you tried Intel hardware and with what software? I ask because your links do not really tell the same story as your post.
The first link says that Mesa got “more Intel optimizations”. That sounds like a good thing. It basically says the same thing about AMD and NVIDIA. The only GPU “crash” that was addressed was for AMD which is widely regarded as the best option for Linux. I would not read that article and come away with any concerns about Intel.
The second link says that kernel 6.2 added “full Intel support”. We are now in kernel 6.7. I use a rolling release and how a much newer kernel than 6.2. A brief Google leads me to believe that 6.5 ships with both Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora 39.
I have not used these cards myself so I do it know but others have said the experience was decent now. The OP does not seem that demanding. If it ok now and actively improving, he may be quite happy. It sounds better than nouveau for sure. Is it really as bad as you say?
With GNOME and KDE going Wayland only, it is all but over for X. Qt, GTK, and Electron already work on Wayland so most apps are ready. Cinnamon, XFCE, Enlightenment, and MATE all have Wayland plans now. There are a few compositor libraries that other window managers and desktop environments can leverage.
NVIDIA is slowly getting their act together. Many of the legitimate complainants are being addressed. There are desirable features starting to appear that are Wayland only. Even non-Linux systems are adding Wayland support.
It is hard to believe after so many years but I think that, by Christmas 2024, most Linux users will have stopped using X and maybe even stopped talking about it.
If we are marking the birth of Linux and trying to call it GNU / Linux, we should remember our history.
Linux was not created with the intention of being part of the GNU project. In this very announcement, it says “not big and professional like GNU”. Taking away the adjectives, the important bit is “not GNU”. Parts of GNU turned out to be “big and professional”. Look at who contributes to GCC and Glibc for example. I would argue that the GNU kernel ( HURD ) is essentially a hobby project though ( not very “professional” ). The rest of GNU never really not that “big” either. My Linux distro offers me something like 80,000 packages and only a few hundred of them are associated with the GNU project.
What I wanted to point out here though is the license. Today, the Linux kernel is distributed via the GPL. This is the Free Software Foundation’s ( FSF ) General Public License—arguably the most important copyleft software license. Linux did not start out GPL though.
In fact, the early goals of the FSF and Linus were not totally aligned.
The FSF started the GNU project to create a POSIX system that provides Richard Stallman’s four freedoms and the GPL was conceived to enforce this. The “free” in FSF stands for freedom. In the early days, GNU was not free as in money as Richard Stallman did not care about that. Richard Stallman made money for the FSF by charging for distribution of GNU on tapes.
While Linus Torvalds as always been a proponent of Open Source, he has not always been a great advocate of “free software” in the FSF sense. The reason that Linus wrote Linux is because MINIX ( and UNIX of course ) cost money. When he says “free” in this announcement, he means money. When he started shipping Linux, he did not use the GPL. Perhaps the most important provision of the original Linux license was that you could NOT charge money for it. So we can see that Linus and RMS ( Richard Stallman ) had different goals.
In the early days, a “working” Linux system was certainly Linux + GNU ( see my reply elsewhere ). As there was no other “free” ( legally unencumbered ) UNIX-a-like, Linux became popular quickly. People started handing out Linux CDs at conferences and in universities ( this was pre-WWW remember ). The Linux license meant that you could not charge for these though and, back then, distributing CDs was not cheap. So being an enthusiastic Linux promoter was a financial commitment ( the opposite of “free” ).
People complained to Linus about this. Imposing financial hardship was the opposite of what he was trying to do. So, to resolve the situation, Linus switched the Linux kernel license to GPL.
The Linux kernel uses a modified GPL though. It is one that makes it more “open” ( as in Open Source ) but less “free” ( as in RMS / FSF ).
Switching to the GPL was certainly a great move for Linux. It exploded in popularity. When the web become a thing in the mid-90’s, Linux grew like wild fire and it dragged parts of the GNU project into the limelight wit it.
As a footnote, when Linus sent this announcement that he was working on Linux, BSD was already a thing. BSD was popular in academia and a version for the 386 ( the hardware Linus had ) had just been created. As BSD was more mature and more advanced, arguably it should have been BSD and not Linux that took over the world. BSD was free both in terms or money and freedom. It used the BSD license of course which is either more or less free than the GPL depending on which freedoms you value. Sadly, AT&T sued Berkeley ( the B in BSD ) to stop the “free”‘ distribution of BSD. Linux emerged as an alternative to BSD right at the moment that BSD was seen as legally risky. Soon, Linux was reaching audiences that had never heard of BSD. By the time the BSD lawsuit was settled, Linux was well on its way and had the momentum. BSD is still with us ( most purely as FreeBSD ) but it never caught up in terms of community size and / or commercial involvement.
If not for that AT&T lawsuit, there may have never been a Linux as we know it now and GNU would probably be much less popular as well.
Ironically, at the time that Linus wrote this announcement, BSD required GCC as well. Modern FreeBSD uses Clang / LLVM instead but this did not come around until many, many years later. The GNU project deserves its place in history and not just on Linux.
My guess is that somebody has some important “Windows” application that they need to run that is calling into Cygwin. That means that the proper way to run it on Linux is almost certainly just to port it from Cygwin to Linux native. How do you do this though if somebody else wrote the code?
Think of the opportunity Linux creates in a place like India. If you have some smarts and a good work ethic, Linux and a machine from 2010 allows you to run the very latest software used by tech giants all over the world.
You can self-teach a huge number of skills on Linux and become deeply familiar with the REAL software that professionals are using—even in the West. One you know your stuff, you can leverage that into a job that pays fantastic money by local standards.
If you want to be a developer, you can build a GitHub portfolio or participate in Open Source projects.
If you are more entrepreneurial, you can post videos showing others how to use the skills you have acquired. These not only make a fantastic resume but they can generate advertising income. What may seem like a poor return on time in richer countries can provide important income in poorer ones.
If you have not tried it, you may be amazed that you can run up-to-the minute current versions of Docker, Kubernetes, databases, dev in any language ( even .NET ), and almost any other in-demand technology on really old Linux hardware.
Beyond hard technology skills, a Linux computer is just a fabulous productivity tool. You can get hardware and software to help manage your business that you perhaps could never afford otherwise. If you are a creative professional, you have access to amazing tools. If you are a photographer, you have pro level tools. If you are an architect or engineer, same thing. Again, we can say that some of these are not “professional” but I bet they do the job in markets where few can afford expensive software.
About the only things that push the hardware envelope these days are video editing, AI, and gaming. Even these work better than you may think though. It will take you longer but you can do pretty good video editing on 2010 HW for example.
I suspect it is a combination of its being free, working well on older hardware, and the tech literacy in India.
Software development and engineering are important aspects of the Indian economy. Linux is arguably the best platform for that kind of work, especially in the cloud. Tech support of those kinds of systems require the same skills.
Given how well Linux runs on older machines, I consider low Linux penetration a hallmark of rich countries.
In my own household, Linux goes on all the older hardware ( including Macs ). That has really extended the length of time before hardware needs to be replaced. It also means that, over time, the percentage of active equipment using Linux has increased.