LeFantome

@LeFantome@programming.dev

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LeFantome,

My experience with Arch is that it has been very solid and stable. It is just “makes sense” for the most part and so issues are very resolvable.

If you use the AUR, you can get times when packages need to be excluded ( held back ) in order for the overall system to update. I do not see that as an Arch problem and it is easy to handle.

One thing that is an Arch problem is that, if you do not update often enough, you can end-up with outdated keys that prevent you from installing before packages. The solution is just to update the keyring before updating everything else but this is confusing for a new user and kind of dumb in my opinion. I feel like the system should do this for me.

Ironically, I find Arch is most stable if you update very frequently ( which makes the updates smaller and more incremental ). I do a quick update almost every day without any fear of breaking my system. Any “problems” I have had with Arch updates are trying to update a system that has not been updated forever. Even then, it is just a bit more work.

Another thing that can happen if you leave it too long is that packages will have been replaced by newer ones. Keeping up to date means there are only going to be a small number of those. An update after a year can run into a surprising number of them.

I dug out an old laptop that had Arch on it from 3 years before. Updating it was annoying but in the end it was totally up to date and stable.

LeFantome,

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.

Made the switch to KDE

I’ve been using Fedora for a couple of months now, and have been loving it. Very soon after I jumped into this community (among other Linux communities) and started laughing at all the people saying “KDE rules, GNOME drools,” and “GNOME is better, KDE is for babies.” But then I thought, “Why not give KDE a try? The...

LeFantome,

I am usually on the pro-Wayland side but with GNOME and KDE the Wayland implementations are fairly independent. That means that your statement that KDE going “Wayland by default is going to benefit gnome too since it’ll put more priority on bugs” is watered down somewhat.

Fixing bugs in the KDE compositor / display server ( KWin ) will not necessarily address bugs or missing functionality in GNOME ( Mutter ). A lot of what they share is also shared with Xorg ( libinput, libdrm, KMS, Mesa ).

On the application side, apps lean heavily on the toolkit libraries. KDE apps are built with Qt and GNOME apps are built with GTK. Fixing Qt bugs may not improve the quality of GTK and vice versa.

Smaller projects will share more infrastructure. Many other environments are using Wlroots as a compositor library for example. Fixing bugs there will benefit them all but again is independent of KDE and GNOME.

Your point is still valid though. For one thing, the larger the Wayland user base, the greater the number of use cases the Wayland protocol itself will be adapted to address and the more testing and development everything in the Wayland ecosystem will get.

Over time, one benefit of multiple implementations will probably be code quality. Apps that run well in multiple environments are well implemented and the same is true of environments that provide the necessarily features to a large body of apps. In that way, more bugs will be found and fixed in all environments.

LeFantome,

You are relying 100% on physical security. If nobody can take your drive or physically operate your computer, it is safe.

If I could boot a USB stick on your machine, or pull the drive, accessing your data would be trivial.

The Unity Desktop Environment an Underrated Masterpiece (unityd.org)

Why is the unity is underrated when its what i use right now with Ubuntu Unity and its actually really great experience for my 2021 HP Stream 11 Laptop and i hope you all to share your experiences using the unity de in Debain Ubuntu Arch Fedora Gentoo Opensuse Etc thanks for your Amazing community my Wonderful Friends

LeFantome,

GPT would offer excellent English and perhaps some nice formatting in at least twice as many words.

LeFantome,

A lot of people are saying its the best. Perhaps they are right. I don’t kmow. And I hear it all the time. “It’s the best! It’s the best!”. Who knows. But a lot of great people are saying it. Maybe the best people. That’s just what I hear.

LeFantome,

Why not use Unity then? You still can.

LeFantome,

Now that you mention it, Trump sounds a bit like the way FreeBSD people talk about Linux.

“When they send us Linux distributions, they are not sending their best. Linux is an unplanned, undocumented, unusable, crashy mess. Some, I assume, are also good distros.”

LeFantome,

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.

LeFantome,

Waypipe addresses forwarding. The major Wayland compositors support either RDP or VNC already I believe.

LeFantome,

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.

LeFantome,

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.

LeFantome,

Agreed ( on the code ). Wayland and Xorg also share libinput, libdrm, KMS, and Mesa.

The biggest difference is that Red Hat will stop bundling this stuff up together, testing it, and created releases. Most of the actual code will still be maintained though.

LeFantome,

“Forwarding GUI programs” already works. Check out Waypipe.

LeFantome,

Xwayland is likely to be with us a very long time. I do not see Motif adding Wayland support anytime soon for example. How long for GNUstep to hop on board?

Why didn't anyone remind me the dual booting exists?

I was talking to my dad yesterday and he talked about how he dual booted windows and Linux in his college days. I immediately left to download Ubuntu, I feel so dumb for forgetting it’s an option. I literally only use windows so I can play Fortnite with friends. PSA: you can have both Linux and Windows, or you can use a vm in...

LeFantome, (edited )

I think they may actually be suggesting that you let each OS be the primary OS and then just control which one you want via boot order in the BIOS.

But yes, if Windows is able to install its boot loader on its own drive, it will not mess up the Linux boot loader on another drive. The Linux boot loader can detect Windows though and allow you to boot to it ( and Linux too of course ). That is why you make sure Linux boots first.

I finally switched back to Linux as my daily driver after a couple of years of being on nothing but Windows.

I ran Manjaro Linux as my daily driver a few years ago but slowly phased it out for Windows for some reason, and I’m finally back using Linux (currently Linux Mint). I gotta say, I don’t know why I ever switched back to Windows. There’s just so much freedom Linux gives you right off the bat that Windows is just plain...

LeFantome,

Are you using Mint ( LMDE ) or running Cinnamon on Debian directly?

LeFantome,

Well, if obviously comes from the world of cars. My guess is that its use there dates back to before PCs. It just make sense that people that already used it for cars would apply it to computers. It is hard to know the timing. Probably at the point that at least some people started to have access to more than one.

LeFantome,

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.

LeFantome,

I also used Manjaro and it broke on me multiple times. I did not realize how badly it was messing up the AUR until I switched. I use EndeavourOS now.

May I ask why you use Manjaro?

LeFantome,

Give EndeavourOS a go one of these days and compare it head-to-head with Manjaro. I bet you never look back.

LeFantome,

Out-of-the-box, Proxmox runs on Debian. That and PiHole are the two Debian instances I run.

Preparing to move from Ubuntu to Fedora

Hi! I’m seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing,...

LeFantome, (edited )

You better hope that Cinnamon migrates to Wayland before Red Hat stops supporting Xorg. Despite the deeply researched and evidence based opinion above, Red Hat is the the primary contributor to many of the technologies propping up Mint. Xorg is MIT licensed of course and Red Hat has no obligation to share their changes for Xorg with Mint but they do. Most of the original software Red Hat writes is released under the GPL and used by every other distro. The very first program that Debian runs when it boots was written and is maintained by Red Hat. Fedora was founded by Red Hat to explicitly be community based and they pay the salaries of many of the prominent contributors. Regardless of what you think of Red Hat’s behaviour, I am embarrassed for anybody that honestly believes Red Hat is closed source, even without the all caps.

Micro***t Word on Linux and alternatives

Are there good Microsoft word alternatives that support Linux (I don’t mind closed source)? Libreoffice is meh and only office is quite good, but are there any better ones? Also, is there a way to install word on Linux using wine? When I do that my laptop just overheats and loses internet connection.

LeFantome,

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.

LeFantome,

Colour spaces are ready. They are saying I may be hard to wire it up in all the right places in a month. Why not take two months and get it in? I mean, it has been over a decade already.

Many people have been waiting for 3.x for literally half their lives. To save a month, they are going to launch 3.x with the big change being the toolkit? Seems like a wasted opportunity.

If it were going to be 6 months or more I would agree with you. From the write-up though, they delay would only be a few weeks.

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