I am not saying “This is the Year of the Linux Desktop”. That said, things languished below 2% for decades and now it has doubled in just over a year. With the state of Linux Gaming, I could see that happening again.
Also, if ChromeOS continues to converge, you could consider it a Linux distro at some point and it also has about 4% share.
Linux could exceed 10% share this year and be a clear second after Windows.
That leaves me wondering, what percentage do we have to hit before it really is “The Year of the Linux Desktop”. I have never had to wonder that before ( I mean, it obviously was not 3% ). Having to ask is a milestone in itself.
Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate....
Manjaro - used to love it. Now the only distro I actively advise against
Garuda - just too much ( I prefer Arch / EndeavourOS )
Elementary - wanted to love it - just too limited
Gentoo - realized I just don’t want to build everything
RHEL Workstation - everything too old
Bhodi - honestly do not remember - long ago
Ubuntu - ok, let’s expand…
These days, I dislike Snaps. Ubuntu just never hit the sweet spot for me though. I was already an experienced Linux user when it appeared and preferred RPM based distros at the tome. Ubuntu always seemed slow and fragile to me. Setting things up, like Apache with Mono back in the day, was “different” on Ubuntu and that annoyed me. For most of its history, it is what I would recommend to new users but I just never liked it myself.
Debian Stable - ok, let’s expand
I really like Debian. It was also a little “alien” when I was using Fedora / Mandrake and the like but it never bothered me like Ubuntu. I ran RHEL / Centos as servers so I did not need Debian stability. As a desktop, Debian packages were always just a little too old ( especially for dev ). The lack of non-free firmware made it a pain.
These days though, Debian has been growing on me. The move to include non-free firmware has made it much more practical. With Flatpaks and Distrobox, aging packages is much less of a problem too. I could see myself using Debian. I am strongly considering moving to VanillaOS ( immutable Debian ).
I basically do not run any RHEL servers anymore. At home, I have a fair bit running Debian already ( Proxmox, PiHole, PiVPN, and a Minecraft server ).
EndeavourOS is my primary desktop these days ( and I love it ) but it is mostly for the AUR. A Debian base with an Arch Distrobox might be perfect. Void seems quite nice as well.
I have been an Open Source advocate forever ( and used to say Free Software and FLOSS ). I have used Linux daily since the 0.99 kernels and I even installed 386BSD back in the day. Despite that, the biggest “not for me” distros right now are anything too closely associated with the politics of the GNU project. It has almost made me want to leave Linux and I have considered moving to FreeBSD. I would love to use Haiku. OCI containers and the huge software ecosystem keep me on Linux though.
The distribution that intrigues me the most right now is Chimera Linux. I run it with an Arch distrobox and it may become my daily driver. The pragmatism of projects like SerenityOS really attracts me. Who knows it may be what finally pulls me away after 30+ years of Linux.
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.
With support ending for Windows 10, the most popular desktop operating system in the world currently, possibly 240 million pcs may be sent to the landfill. This is mostly due to Windows 11’s exorbitant requirements. This will most likely result in many pcs being immediately outdated, and prone to viruses. GNU/Linux may be...
This article was written in the sense of bashing gnome but yet some points seem to be valid. It explains the history of gtk 1 to 4 and the influence of gnome in gtk. I’m not saying gnome is bad here, instead I find this an interesting to read and I’m sharing it.
Most of the GTK environments seem to be doing fine. Most of them seem headed to Wayland as well with the maturity of GTK in Wayland making that easier. Cinnamon will be ready for Wayland in a few months with both XFCE and MATE likely to have something out next year.
Incredibly, GIMP itself may finally get off GTK+ 2. They claim that GIMP 3 will launch in February. We will see how long it takes to get to GTK4. I think the transition will be easier. The jump from 2 to 3 was a big one.
COSMIC of course is going its own way with the Iced toolkit.
On the app side, GTK seems to still be a very popular option.
In terms of conclusions, I do not see mainstream resistance to new GTK versions. Some people balked at GNOME 3 but GNOME today seems more popular than ever. MATE faithfully kept the old GNOME experience but has migrated to newer GTK. It was not a rebellion against the toolkit.
Come the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is officially dropping the Xorg package, whilst it’ll still be available in RHEL 9 until 2032 the countdown has begun, Xorg is on the way out. Are you and your software going to be ready in time....
People are completely missing the point here. “Who made Red Hat the arbiter of when Xorg should end?”
I would say nobody but perhaps a better answer is all of us that have left the work of maintaining Xorg to Red Hat. All that Red Hat is deciding is when they are going to stop contributing. So little is done by others that, if Red Hat stops, Xorg is effectively done.
Others are of course free to step up. In fact, it may not be much work. Red Hat will still be doing most of the work as they will still be supporting Xwayland ( mostly the same code as Xorg ), libdrm, libinput, KMS, and other stuff that both Xorg and Wayland share. They just won’t be bundling it up, testing it, and releasing it as Xorg anymore.
I used to be a huge Manjaro fan. There were many ways it let me down, some of which were just bad governance.
The biggest problem though is the AUR. Manjaro uses packages that are older than Arch. The AUR assumes the Arch packages. This, if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.
It is not a question of if Manjaro will break but when. Every ex-Manjaro user has the same story.
For me, EndeavourOS is everything that Manjaro should be.
If you are a Linux user and like commercial games, you probably would prefer them to work on Linux.
“Market share” on Linux aligns the vested interest of game makers and Linux game players. If the company thinks it can make money, it will do more to allow games to run, or at least do less to stop them.
Red Hat has formally confirmed what many were thinking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 will be doing away with X.Org Server support aside from XWayland....
I thought this as well but the more I think about it, the less true this seems. From an engineering point of view, it could last longer.
Xwayland is really just Xorg and Xwayland continues to be supported in RHEL10 and beyond.
Xorg and Wayland compositors have grown together in some ways. Both now use libinput, libdrm, and KMS for example. Those are not going away.
Xwayland is really just Xorg adapted to talk to Wayland instead of KMS and libinput. It is mostly the same code. So, Xorg will continue to benefit from the care and attention that Xwayland gets. Perhaps there may not be many new features but the code is not going to bit rot and security will continue to be addressed. While Xwayland does not use libinput or KMS, the Wayland compositor itself will, so those pieces are also going to be maintained including new features and new hardware support. Mesa is a common component as well.
So, while Red Hat may stop coordinating releases of Xorg at some point, a surprising amount of the code will still be actively maintained and current. It may not take a lot of work for somebody else to take over and bundle it up as a release.
What will probably kill Xorg is lack of demand.
Despite the anti-Wayland chatter, the migration to Wayland looks like it will gain substantial momentum this year and next and not only on Linux. Three to five years from now, the number of people that still care about Xorg ( as the primary display server - not as Xwayland ) may be very small indeed. Obviously it will be running on older systems for a long, long time but, ten years from now, installing Xorg on a new system is likely to be very rare ( like CP/M now rare ).
Red Hat may end up being one of the very last players that cares about Xorg after 2030. My guess is that most of the current never-Wayland crowd will have moved to it long before then.
This actually makes it sound like Xorg will be supported longer than I thought.
I understood RHEL9 to already be Wayland based and so I was expecting the clock to runout on Xorg when RHEL8 went off support. RHEL9 does default to Wayland but it sounds like Xorg remained a fully supported option for those that wanted it. The move to Wayland only being proposed for RHEL10 did not happen on RHEL9.
RHEL8 goes off support in 2029 but RHEL9 is supported until 2032. The implications of this article are that Red Hat will not put much energy into Xorg after 2025 ( RHEL10 ) but they will still have to support their customers. This at least means security fixes but it likely means continued viability of modern hardware to a certain extent as well.
Regardless, this also highlights one of the “hidden”‘contributions of Red Hat and how much the entire ecosystem relies on them. This can be seen as good or bad but I wish the public debate involving them would at least accurately reflect it.
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.
I realize that the major point of GIMP 3 is the port to GTK3. That said, I feel like colour spaces are what people have been waiting for and probably the most significant deficiency that keeps GIMP from being treated as a professional tool.
If they are really this close, why not set the GIMP 3 release date for when colour management is ready?
Non-destructive editing will be huge as well. GIMP 3 is really going to be a crazy leap forward. It is going to be amazing to finally get access to all this work that has been walled off for decades.
The bug situation sounds terrible. Honestly though, they should just get 3 out and then make bug fixing the number one job until it gets into better shape.
Not only is it a small team but right now there are basically two different projects ( 2 and 3 ). With only one code base, perhaps the pace of progress can improve.
Calamares uses the QML / Qt toolkit. Most of the people involved in Calamares are also involved in the KDE Project.
XFCE use the GTK toolkit.
So, it is totally reasonable to say that KDE is “more native”.
While Wayland maybe a factor, KDE itself will not be fully Wayland compatible until Plasma 6 next year. So that does not really explain the timing of this move.
I use XFCE myself so I am a bit nervous about the change. We will see.
I thought this was an article talking about how Wayland makes it possible to perform deeply low-level optimizations to improve the performance of things like high-resolution video playback. Thank you for clearing it up for me.
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.
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 ).
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.
Hello, yesterday I officially released Louvre v1.0.0, a C++ library designed for building Wayland compositors with a primary focus on ease of development. It provides a default method for handling protocols, input events, and rendering, which you can selectively and progressively override as required, allowing you to see a...
Many people have predicted the death of the small, independent window manager with the coming of Wayland. I have heard multiple times that only large projects like GNOME and KDE would be able to take on the burden of making a compositor.
Now, I do think that lots of no longer actively developed window managers could get left behind. But the idea that it will be too complicated to create a window manager now is turning out to be wrong.
First, fewer desktop environments are getting left behind than feared. XFCE, Cinnamon, and MATE all seem to have Wayland plans now.
The big change is the appearance of not one but multiple compositor libraries designed to make it easier to create a window manager for Wayland. Some of them look like they might make it easier than it was under X. The approach taken by this one makes the idea of hacking around with it very inviting.
Although having to create a compositor has made things difficultly until now, I think the idea of decoupling the compositor for Wayland is going to look smart in the long run.
Being separate from Wayland, compositor devs are free to experiment and window manager authors can select the one that best maps to their goals.
I was reading up on Oasis Linux yesterday. It comes with a Wayland compositor ( SWC ) and tiling window manager ( Velox ) that are less than 20,000 lines of code combined!
It would not be practical for a light-weight distro to trim down Xorg like that. But I the compositor is separate, it can be either smaller or feature rich. SWC is XWayland compatible but obviously that is going to add more size if you need it.
Looking forward to the window manager innovation that projects like Louvre enable.
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?
In 2000, I wrote a Linux device driver that “decrypted” the output of a certain device, and my company, which hosted open-source projects, agreed to host it....
Linux reaches new high 3.82% (gs.statcounter.com)
KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future (www.phoronix.com)
Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate....
What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"?
I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.
Ending support for Windows 10 could send 240 million computers to the landfill. Why not install Linux on them? (gadgettendency.com)
With support ending for Windows 10, the most popular desktop operating system in the world currently, possibly 240 million pcs may be sent to the landfill. This is mostly due to Windows 11’s exorbitant requirements. This will most likely result in many pcs being immediately outdated, and prone to viruses. GNU/Linux may be...
Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments? (ludditus.com)
This article was written in the sense of bashing gnome but yet some points seem to be valid. It explains the history of gtk 1 to 4 and the influence of gnome in gtk. I’m not saying gnome is bad here, instead I find this an interesting to read and I’m sharing it.
Make a Linux App (makealinux.app)
Make a Linux app. Stop making distributions.
[Video] Red Hat Is About To End Xorg: Is Wayland Ready? (www.youtube.com)
Come the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is officially dropping the Xorg package, whilst it’ll still be available in RHEL 9 until 2032 the countdown has begun, Xorg is on the way out. Are you and your software going to be ready in time....
Manjaro OS
So I’ve been iso live testing Manjaro KDE Plasma lately and it looks very polished....
Steam Linux Marketshare Surges To Nearly 2% In November (www.phoronix.com)
store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
How safe are my data if my hard drive isn't encrypted?
linux4noobs@lemmy.world
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Dropping The X.Org Server Except For XWayland (www.phoronix.com)
Red Hat has formally confirmed what many were thinking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 will be doing away with X.Org Server support aside from XWayland....
My first year using Linux: My experience
In the end of November 2022 (1 year ago), I switched from MacOs to Linux (Debian with KDE Plasma) on my MacBook....
GIMP 3.0 finally has a release schedule (librearts.org)
EndeavourOS Ditches Xfce for KDE Plasma with the Galileo Release (9to5linux.com)
Introducing graphics offload – GTK Development Blog (blog.gtk.org)
A response to the "Boycott Wayland" article
Link to article: gist.github.com/…/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f227…...
Wine Wayland Driver Lands Improved HiDPI Support (www.phoronix.com)
Louvre: C++ library for building Wayland compositors. (lemmy.world)
Hello, yesterday I officially released Louvre v1.0.0, a C++ library designed for building Wayland compositors with a primary focus on ease of development. It provides a default method for handling protocols, input events, and rendering, which you can selectively and progressively override as required, allowing you to see a...
The Wine development release 8.20 is now available. (www.winehq.org)
The Wine development release 8.20 is now available....
Here's all the source code
In 2000, I wrote a Linux device driver that “decrypted” the output of a certain device, and my company, which hosted open-source projects, agreed to host it....