Visual Studio for Mac is rebranded MonoDevelop which actually started on Linux. It is even deader though as MS stopped releasing code to MonoDevelop even before they killed Studio for Mac.
If you are doing C# on Linux though, check out Jet Brains Rider. You can try the Early Access Program for free. Some people ( like me ) consider Rider better than Visual Studio. It is certainly better than Visual Studio for Mac.
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.
I have noticed that one of the groups that does not seem to be complaining about Wayland are the toolkit folks. GTK added support back in GTK3. Qt added it. Enlightenment added it. They must have jumped on it for a reason.
When you look at the Wayland readiness docs for things like XFCE, it stands out that all the apps are already ready ( because they are GTK based in this case ).
I am trying to think of how to respond to this without being a jerk.
Let me skip to the end. Until very recently, I thought of Manjaro users as innocents that just did not understand the risk. Like islanders living next to a volcano that had never erupted in their lifetime.
I still view most Manjaro users that way. Manjaro defenders though I now think of as dog owners whose animals have bitten multiple times. When told, the owner insists that “my dog would never do that” or “if it did, you must have done something wrong”. I am done arguing with those people. All I can do is warn others that this dog has bitten several of us and you may not want to enter that yard. If you do, who knows, the dog may be friendly. Or not. Again, all I can tell you is that many of us have scars. Use that information as you will.
Most “Manjaro detractors” I have encountered have years of experience with both Manjaro and other Arch distros. Their tales come from experience. When they share their cautionary tales, there are often Manjaro defenders whose best defence is just to deny that what the “detractors” are saying ( about their own experience ) is real.
My core question for the defenders would be, if it is our fault, why do we only encounter the problems on Manjaro?
Let’s go through the bullets above one by one:
I never did that on Manjaro. I probably do it more on EOS. Why only problems on Manjaro?
why does my lack of knowledge of how the AUR works only break things on Manjaro?
this bullet is the best. It admits that Manjaro has repeatedly broken things but we should not hold it against it. Literally this is saying that “Manjaro breaks things” is wrong because, while it does, we should just get over it. Hilarious.
how does attacking the “detractors” address the claim that Manjaro breaks things?
how does attacking the “detractors” address the claim that Manjaro breaks things?
I got in a lengthy back and forth with a Manjaro fan the other day where I repeatedly related the ways that Manjaro used to break on me and how that does not happen for me on vanilla Arch or EndeavourOS. They just kept coming back telling me that it could not have happened and, if I thought it could, that I did not understand how the AUR works. It was insane. Basically, this guy could not follow what I was saying to him. His response to his inability to understand the scenario that I was describing was to insult my intelligence and expertise.
Look loser. I don’t care if you believe me that your dog bites. I will continue to warn people and they can decide if they want to risk it or not.
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.
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?
I think the drama around Wayland can be explained by the sentence “it should be a drop-in replacement like pipewire but isn’t”.
Without taking a side on that issue, I will point out that this was not a goal for the Wayland designers ( in their own words - I do not have time to go find a quote but have read this sentiment many times ). Wayland detractors agree with your sentence and, given that expectation, are legitimately upset and even confused that Wayland continues to gain mind and market share against X11.
If you feel that Wayland needs to be a drop-in replacement for X11, it is not ready and may never be. By that metric, some people see Wayland as a failed technology and perceive Wayland users as shills and zealots.
If you are interested in a display server that addresses some of the core design problems in X11 and do not mind moving to something new, Wayland is starting to look ready for prime-time.
If you are non-technical and / or unopinionated the debate is probably irrelevant. Wayland will most likely become the default on whatever Linux distribution you use sometime in 2024 or 2025. You will be a Wayland user. Maybe you already are.
If you are willing to step outside the mainstream, using X11 without Wayland is going to be possible for at least another decade. That said, I am saying “outside the mainstream” because not only will popular Linux distributions and desktop environments start to become Wayland only but the innovation is all going to move to Wayland. There will be many Wayland-only compositors, apps, and features. 5 years from now, not using Wayland is going to really limit the desktop experience. I expect some toolkits ( GTK, Qt, and maybe even WINE ) to drop X11 support at some point ( maybe not soon but sooner than 10 years maybe ). 5 - 10 years may seem like a long time but it will likely come faster than X11 stalwarts expect.
As a small counterpoint, I am supposed to use Windows at work but I use Linux. I would say that I am a “very heavy” but intermediate Microsoft Office user. That is, while I am not expert level in Office, I have to create and consume multiple documents per day. I give ( or submit ) several PowerPoints per week. These typically use templates supplied by Marketing or others. I create and consume multiple Excel files daily which almost always have multiple worksheets. I must admit that I have gotten authoring Word files down to maybe one per week but I open 3 a day at least.
Of course, I do not actually use Microsoft Office most of the time. Most of the above is in LibreOffice. I spend a tonne of my day in Outlook which I use in a browser ( Office 365 ). If I am opening a document from an email, it will often open in Office 365 online ( in my browser in Linux ). So do I use Microsoft Office quite a bit but rarely author anything there. While I prefer Firefox, I use Microsoft Edge on Linux and most often that is where I have Outlook open. Sadly, I have at least 3 to 4 Microsoft Teams meetings a day. Teams and GoToMeeting are why I started using Edge. It is just a nicer workflow if Teams and Outlook are in the same browser.
Anyway, I have very little problem exchanging documents. I had to switch to default fonts that Windows users will have of course but that was long ago now. So, I would not say that “alternatives such as LibreOffice aren’t just good enough” is a fair assessment for everybody. If I was an expert user in any one app ( in Finance maybe ) I could see this being true but I bet most office workers could use LibreOffice just fine these days.
Outside of Office, most of what I use are web applications which work just as well on Linux. I use containers a lot and they work better on Linux. Linux is quite bit snappier on the same hardware.
I am just a datapoint though and the issues you raise are real. I would perhaps just be less absolute about it. Trying Linux can still make sense. Also, you can try LibreOffice on Windows before jumping all the way to Linux.
For many uses, Wayland has feature parity now or is even the superior option. That is how it can be the default on so many systems ( including RHEL9 as per the article ).
Compositors that do not provide the features that uses want will fail to compete ( what you mean by become useless I assume ).
That said, different users will want different things and, unlike X, Wayland allows competing compositors to address different communities. Some compositors will lack features some users want while offering features that other users need. A composite targeting embedded use cases may not need multi-monitor or fractional scaling features for example. A security focussed option may think that global hot-keys and external lock-screens are anti-features. I think the Wayland world could be quite interesting.
As a long-time Linux user, I feel like it says something about the maturity of desktop Linux that it is good enough now for the kinds of users that find LibreOffice insufficient.