But after trying the new Cosmic desktop, I basically ran screaming back to Gnome/X11 (with a couple of extensions to give me the old desktop experience from 22.04).

Once 26.04 drops, along with Cosmic Epoch 2, I may give it another serious try. Or I'll just go to KDE6/Wayland and see how that goes. (I do use KiCad from time to time, so I wonder how usable it'll be on Wayland down the line.)

(For reference, my biggest gripe with Cosmic right now is how it can't seem to figure out how to manage window focus. Modal dialogs can lose focus to their base window, and sometimes become covered by that base window. And focus-follows-mouse hasn't been done right ever. Both have issues written up, I just hope they get attention. Meanwhile, throngs of people seem to "swear" it "works fine for them.")

I go back and forth between Fedora and Ubuntu a lot, and once you get past the snap/flatpak and the apt/dnf differences everything feels the same.

I usually format my Fedora disk ext4, add flatpak to my Ubuntu installs, manually override the fonts, add dash-to-panel.. the resulting experience ends up identical.

Because many other DMs and WMs do not have issues with Wayland.

I had to give up on my previous attempt a couple years ago with Linux Mint/X11 because it was an exercise in futility trying to make my various apps look acceptable on my mixed DPI monitor setup.

Linux Mint with Wayland clearly was not getting a lot of attention at the time, and the general attitude when I looked up bugs seemed to be "just don't use Wayland", but maybe the situation has improved by now. It was also kinda off-putting reading Reddit/forum comments whose attitude towards per-monitor DPI scaling on Linux in general was basically "why would anyone need that" when it's been a basic Windows feature for a decade+.

Fedora on the other hand was literally just plug-and-play and has been very enjoyable to use as my daily driver.

Cosmic works great for a laptop. But it's a PITA for a desktop. It doesn't deal with multi monitor setups well. There's a recent new bug where the system hardlocks on monitor power state changes, which is unacceptable.

So: great for single screen laptop, not good for desktop or server

Making a new DE plus compositor is a lot of work, but I do hope it works well for the Pop_OS developers.

[1] https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/issues/2174

Overall I think it's much better that options exist. I'm even willing to tolerate GUI inconsistency across the Linux ecosystem in exchange.

When I first grabbed my current setup about 2 years ago, the nvidia drivers had all sorts of annoying and painful bugs to work around. However, there were workarounds.

Now, everything mostly just works. The only thing I struggle with is sleep which seems to be permanently broke in the latest nvidia drivers.

The last time a distro tried to sell me on it, it left me unable to drag/drop browser tabs to reorder them (a fundamental part of my daily workflow). Thankfully, Mint still has the option to use X11 so reverting was trivial. That won't always be the case because...

> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

Which, like avoiding systemd, is becoming increasingly difficult as distributions prematurely switch. Like when some Linux distros made KDE4 the default (~20 years ago) before most graphics cards could actually handle KDE4's requirements. Switching distros after years, even decades, of use is not as trivial as distro-hoppers who swap out their distro every three weeks might like to think. Lots of know-how and muscle memory gets lost in the transition, both of which have to be rebuilt.

People cursed the name for years, because it exposed all of the terrible, glitchy audio hardware drivers and refused on general principle to work around the issues to the degree that previous audio solutions had. And the result was that while the experience was inconsistent and buggy for years, it did eventually drag the Linux audio stack into a better place.

This is my understanding of his actual concern - Linux corps are pushing Wayland as a replacement for X11 when it is full of issues.

Anecdotally my experience was the same. I'm a dev so I'm fine in a terminal, but trying to switch to KDE actually sent me BACK to Windows. Basic windowing stuff just does not work, and like the OP says, tons of stutters and crashes for a simple 2-monitor setup. Even something as simple as alt-tabbing lagged for seconds on an overpowered machine. Just does not feel like polished software which is a huge reputational risk for Linux right now.

Options that are equivalent enough for most end users just cause confusion. There are also too many distros, and the Gnome vs. KDE competition set desktop Linux back another 10 years. That's three dimensions of big, important choices with not much downside if you pick the happy path and a whole lot of downside if you don't.

I can no longer use GNOME on X11, and the decision to remove support was a deliberate one. Users are definitely being forced.

Nice to hear fractional scaling situation is better now. Tempted to try it out but.. Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now, and I can still develop in "linux"..

Should've stayed in the terminal where the distro wants you to be!

The real issue with Wayland and “setting back” isn't what the article says, but just that like 15 years was taken just to get Wayland on semi-decent feature-parity with X11 during which time development on X11 came to a standstill. That time could've been used to improve X11 and it's still not real feature parity.

And part of it was just the devs refusing to believe that people needed those features. I talked with them around 2010-ish and about some of the things they cut out claiming that no one ever used them. These were things related to mouse acceleration that is pretty essential to video games and image editing, certain forms of screen capture, various things with fonts and color management that are essential to many professionals and they actually believed that no one used those things. Eventually they came around and added many of those things back in, in doing so basically making many of the initial security promises complete void again but so much time has been put in what isn't much of an improvement to justify the time spent on it.

But it also sounds like whether things work is heavily dependent on how up-to-date the distribution is. I’m not sure if that’s tied in with Nvidia or not.

Is there something I'm missing/something specific you're talking about?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA

That reminds me, I should pull out my NeXT Cube and play with it. That machine is 33mhz of pure power. :-D None the less I still love it.

Whenever they make changes to the program that they are maintaining, which break backwards compatibility, for which an example is replacing X11 with Wayland in the Linux distribution that you may have used for many years, then that forces the users affected by the changes to do potentially a lot of work, in order to find alternatives.

For some special application that you use from time to time, finding an alternative and switching to it may be simple, but when the incompatible changes affect a fundamental system component, which must be used all the time and without which nothing works, e.g. Wayland or systemd, then you must change not some single application, but the entire Linux distribution, and that can be time-consuming, because you may have to learn to do a lot of things in a different way than you are accustomed to.

So obviously, users are not happy about such changes that push work on them without any benefits.

The better Linux distributions may offer their users choices even for such important components like X11 vs. Wayland or OpenRC vs. systemd, for example Gentoo, but the most popular Linux distributions tend to not offer choices for this kind of system components, so when they replace such a component, the users must either accept the change or stop using that Linux distribution, and both choices are bad, because they must adapt their workflow.

It was plainly really poorly-architected, just looking at its resource use patterns made this obvious in a heartbeat.

I've read about some terrible experiences with Wayland and I've just never had any of these problems in nearly a decade of using it almost every day (sway was a little rough around the edges in the first year it came out, but even then it fixed screen tearing, which I was never able to entirely eliminate with Xorg). The two things I've always stayed away from though is KDE, and nVidia.

I'm just trying to figure out why there's such a discrepancy between my experiences and what I read online from time to time.

In what way? If there’s a delay for the task switching menu to close after alt-tabbing (~500ms) this might be due to a kde animation default (it really tripped me up, I’m a rapid window switcher). I can share the fix once I get on my kde machine.

The problem is old (and even not so old) apps don't expose those APIs so interactions like UI automation on Wayland is limited, if not impossible. I'd love to grant a specific permission just for selected GUI apps, but I can't because they don't support it.

There's a reason why RPA software on Wayland is limited to web apps inside a browser. Or something extremely janky like taking screenshots of the entire desktop and doing OCR. But then you can't interact with unfocused apps.

Wayland just fixed all that, making it at least usable for multimedia/gaming use with my GPU.

Sometimes it's worse to live in a mess that is being constantly fixed I guess.

Yeah, we're talking about completely different threat models here.

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...

https://arcan-fe.com/

Even if someone made something, are they really going to get buy in from all the major players?

It’s Wayland. It’s over.

You can certainly be unhappy with a piece of software regardless of if you paid for it, and there's an argument to be made that linux users benefit from it becoming more popular, but we're still mostly talking about volunteers creating software for themselves and then choosing to share it with others.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool i3 (now sway) user. I don't even use floating windows. Wayland has still been an awful experience, broke a bunch of workflows for me

It's pretty neat learning about iommu groups and doing NVMe passthrough with KVM/Qemu, and also messing around with the new (to me) Spice/virgl 3D acceleration. I was impressed I was able to play YT videos in the Ubuntu Virtual Machine Manager with hand-built mpv/ffmpeg + yt-dlp setup without dropping too many frames or serious glitches. Huzzah for libgl1-mesa-dri.

After that, I rebooted the host OS, jumped into the UEFI boot menu and booted the "guest" NVMe disk directly with my actual GPU, and it still worked. It's quite a trip down memory lane, typing 'startx' and having a both a :0.0 and :0.1 displays. That muscle memory from the 1990s is still going strong.

I don't use KDE (or GNOME anymore) but while I had to deal with a lot of initial speedbumps a couple years ago, these days instead of a full DE, I'm using a Niri setup and it's worked out great for me.

For my laptop, I have my own monitor-detection/wl-mirror script for example that is faster and more reliable for plugging into projectors/meeting room HDMI than even my old Macs.

This may not be KDE's fault; I tracked these kinds of issues down to some bad tunable defaults.

I came up with this:

    ----
    cat /etc/sysctl.d/50-usb-responsiveness.conf
    #
    # Attempt to keep large USB transfers from locking the system (kswapd0)
    #
    vm.swappiness = 1
    vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
    vm.dirty_ratio = 5
    vm.extfrag_threshold = 1000
    vm.compaction_proactiveness = 0
    vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 200
    # FIXME? 64K too big?
    vm.page-cluster = 16
    ----

YMMV, but it's worth a try.

(Oh, and on-topic, I've had to try Wayland (vs. X11) on my KDE desktop 'cause it seems to handle switching monitors when I go from home to work better; jury's still out if I'm keeping it)

This may be Niche, but DAWs are very rare to support linux, especially this stack. I would say it might be a stretch to say the company behind Bitwig is punishing Wayland users, I am sure they don't have the personnel for it, but it is a legitimate issue that companies will most likely be 10 years late to the new modernization into Wayland.

Anyways, I was able to configure it with a specific flake configuration. I had issues with third party windows, which was more of an issue with the floating nature of Niri, since Gnome with Wayland displayed external VSTs fine.

You can find my repository here if interested. It consists of a few files, and I made it easier to use with justfiles. https://github.com/ArikRahman/Nixwig

The fact that people always debate over which one is best is one of the reason why I don't switch to Linux desktop.

Theres always the sane debate of Macos VS Windows VS Linux. That's a good one for me because there are many pros and cons for each of them.

But then, when you try to really look into Linux, it's an unstoppable flow of "systemd=bad", "snap is bad", “only the distro xyz is the real one because it respects principle abc".

Even the emacs VS vim debate seems saner than this.

I know the underlying spirit of Linux is the liberty to choose whatever you want, but this perpetual debate over which is the best only tricks me into believing that whichever distro I'd choose, it will be the wrong one.

Even for my old media server, there are 3 differents Linux mint : Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE.

What am I supposed to do? Spend a few hours to try each one and find the best for my 13 years old i5 with a Nvidia gt440 that's used 3 hours per month?

You can't legally get old versions of Windows or Photoshop, and you can't legally fix them if you find problems. GNOME gives you that freedom.

This isn't just a theoretical possibility: both MATE and Cinnamon are GNOME forks.

You can argue that maintaining and developing a desktop environment is an huge project and you can't expect someone to take that on - I completely agree, which is why I think we should be thankful of the developers instead of complaining about being "forced" to use new versions of their software.

Having technical discussions about the merits is fine, but in the end in the free/open source software model the people that make the technical decisions are the ones that make the technology possible. And if so many of those people are moving to Wayland, maybe there is a reason for that.

Let's imagine this: some company makes an operating system based on Linux, in an efficient manner, by systematically choosing one way to solve a problem (one window manager, one init system, one file system, ...) and trying to meet the requirements of the mass to the detriment of freedom. It exists: it's called Android! Android is great, and it will eventually come to the Desktop for people who don't want Windows or macOS.

But fundamentally, what I call "Linux distributions" is not that. The whole point of Linux distributions, to me, is that even saying "GNU/Linux" doesn't work, because there are other userlands like "busybox/Linux"! Other init systems, other file systems, other windows managers, etc.

The cost of having a powerful core choosing "sane defaults" for the users (Windows, macOS, or similarly Android) is that it is very difficult to modify the system or even contribute to it. Look at e.g. GrapheneOS, an Android alternative (and which I use and love): it relies a lot on Google. Linux distributions are not like that: I can create my own Linux distribution as a weekend project.

Instead of bundling forces to improve a single implementation like it was the case with X11, now everybody and their mother writes their own incomplete implementation of the Wayland protocol, and badly. I don't understand how anybody thinks that this mess is a good thing. At least for X11 on Linux there was a single implementation that contributors could focus on, now the bugs are spread over dozens of projects. If I'd like to sabotage the entire desktop-Linux idea, this is exactly how I would do it ;(

Author’s argument is those hardware improvements could have been had for free with X11 upgrades. I’m not saying it’s a complete argument. But talking about architectural wins sounds like conceding the argument.

> Wayland security

Okay, that's great, but why would I care? If you can implement those security wins transparently in the background, cool. Otherwise, what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.

> OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.

Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities.

One reason is that Xwayland exist and works flawlessly for the majority of casual and professional applications. Better than native x11, in my anecdotal experience.

X11 did chalk many lines of abstractions in absolutely the right places, it's just the implementation was crufty in places, and just not designed for modern hardware in some other places, while wayland just tried to kick as much as possible to the WM side, making it so instead one place where those things need a bunch of code (the display system/its plugins), now every WM have to repeat that work and (more importantly) add incompatibilities because of that

It’s tiny, secure, graphics subsystem independent (it’ll work on just about anything with or without a GPU, I would expect, given the API is so damn simple) and already designed.

Maybe it wouldn’t work, but I bet it would have.

His pain is that it's been 17 years and some basic core functionality is either still broken or entirely missing. It's not my expertise so I don't know if it could have been planned any better, but 17 years and _basics_ still being broken doesn't sound great.

I would agree if you said many of the Wayland Developers people started with Xfee86. But I think the 'complexity' of X has to do with the fact no one of this generation fully understand why X11 did things the way they did, so Wayland was started. That is OK, but here we are.

I think the main issue is proprietary video companies did not to release their specs. I think if the Wayland people told the GPU Companies (like Nvidia) they will not support your hardware unless you release full specs, they would be further along.

OpenBSD is getting along fine without companies like Nvidia, I wish Linux and Wayland would tell these companies their GPUs will never be supported until full documentation is provided.

My problem with it is their proxy for "best" seemed to be "opposite of X11." This was not a solid engineering choice, and I think this post is trying to demonstrate, that had costs.

I'd probably be completely fine with Wayland if it didn't have this obsession with military style desktop security. If it was as open as extensible as X11 by default then we all would have switched. X11 isn't pretty to write code for, but when it works, it works exceptionally well. Wayland seems to have made the wrong sacrifices where it mattered most.

The issue is that free software is fundamentally a political thing and it seems to attract very political people who treat software like an ideology rather than a product who are out to wage war.

The people forcing Wayland are also the people who own and are trying to kill Xorg (stated explicitly) and also trying to cancel people who fork or implement their own X11. So yes, they are actively trying to prevent people from using X11

Recent versions of gnome session are compiled only with wayland support in archlinux. To change DE or distribution or use custom package is quite a stretch to call it's not forced.

> Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".

I think the argument is not that X11 defeats it all - but that for 99.9999% of users its security theater when deployed in the real world. Most commonly, as long as processes can read each other's memory/configuration/etc.

I'm sure there is a use-case for untrusted sharing of Wayland enabled GPU rendering or something - though AFAIK none of the enterprise remote desktop use it, and they have the resources to implement it themselves anyway.

I've been running Wayland for two years now. I still hit weird bugs with desktop sharing / obs tinkering; It's just not a critical use for me.

So it's fair to question the design wisdom of adding the complexity and UX pain points if it seems to be worth so little.

But maybe i'm overlooking some large group of people dependent on Wayland security boundaries?

Windows is terrible relative to a recent version of GNOME on Wayland, slow, bloated, full of spyware and AI.

The commercial force behind SteamOS is largely the financial motivation to deeply care about the user who doesn’t get an apt about the technical details. They’re not there to do computers, they’re there to play a game or watch a movie or whatever. And the Linux community may benefit from the result of that goal, despite likely being salty about not being the audience.

X11's problems were rooted in the abstractions presented by the X11 core protocol and its extension mechanisms. The interface, not merely the implementation.

Wayland was correct in first focusing on replacing this interface. The problem is the effort stopped there and left the ecosystem to figure out the implementation part.

I'd say there were 3 distinct abstractions within NextSTEP: - The microkernel / OS (Mach / BSD) (for the hardware) - The Objective C based SDK - The User experience (not just window manager, but largely the window manager)

The SDK is what is still arguably the most highly regarded part of NeXTSTEP even today. That aside, at the time nothing else was so well polished and integrated on almost every level.

With that said, the dream is not dead. There's a project named Gershwin (https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop), which is a Mac-like desktop environment built on top of GNUstep. Gershwin appears to be heavily inspired by Apple Rhapsody (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system)) with some modern touches.

NeXTSTEP (carried on with OS X), NeWS, Irix are kind the exception on UNIX land.

There is a vertical integration from kernel to application programming and user desktop, alongside its hardware, to provide an unique experience.

In what hardware can do, what programming languages are the official one, THE framework to do XYZ.

Not a mismatch of pieces that often we need to break a corner so that they barely fit with each other.

My supervisor used to have a Cube, and every time I visited his office for demos or questions, there it was left in the corner, with the expectation that everything related to NeXT was going to be away.

Thus this project, and others, as means to keep the research going.

This was before Jobs coming back to Apple, and OpenStep not really going as well as hoped for.

Edit this is running a 32" 2160p120 (4k) monitor alongside a 24" 1080p144 monitor.

I've moved to running Bitwig in an Ubuntu distrobox container. Hope you're enjoying 6, it seems they fixed a lot with the piano roll.

I had to set mouse warping off in my tiling manager for yabridge/wine plugins.

But in the macOS vs Windows vs Linux debate, obviously one has to say what Linux does differently: and that's exactly what you seem to dislike. I.e. the freedom of choice.

I do NOT miss having tearing all the time with X11. There were always kludgy workarounds. Even if you stopped and said ok, lets not run nvidia, let's do intel they have great FOSS driver support, we look back at X11 2D acceleration history. EXA, SNA, UMA, XAA? Oh right all replaced with GLAMOR, OK run modesetting driver, right need a compositor on top of our window manager still because we don't vsync without it.

Do you have monitors with a different refresh rate? Do you have muxes with different cards driving different outputs? All this stuff X11 sucks at. Ok the turd has been polished well now after decades, it doesn't need to run as root/suid anymore, doesn't listen for connections on your network, but the security model still sucks compared to wayland, and once you mix multiple video cards all bets are off.

But yeah, clipboard works reliably, big W for X11.

  > "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!"

  > what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.

But strangely, in decades, I've never seen a single example of anyone taking advantage of this horrible security design and it becoming a widespread problem in the wild. I keep asking the wayland bros to give me an example of this happening in the wild and causing a problem that's even mildly widespread. Strangely when I ask that question they always seem to forget to respond to that part of my post and move on to their next piece of standard rhetoric.

  > Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities

Red Hat, Canonical, etc. want a working and friendly Linux desktop as much as you do. They've decided that Wayland is the best way forward for their companies and their users. It's not some massive conspiracy.

And they're not stopping you from using X, which is open source and still works fine for a lot of people.

I don't really understand what people who vocally object to Wayland are looking to change about the world. Do they want Wayland to be better? Do they want the developers working on Wayland to start working on X instead? The first desire seems reasonable by I don't get why it would inspire such ire toward Wayland. The second desire is unreasonable.

Prophetic words were once spoken and mocked long ere.

https://tools.suckless.org/slock/

Why are you now trying to blame someone else for this decision?

Honestly, this attitude is so irresponsible and childish.

Then, gradually, these things disappeared from Linux, for no good reason; you can still configure them but someone decided in their infinite wisdom that some of the most compelling features just weren't really needed anymore, in favour of rewriting the XDM again and again until now there's too many of them and none of them are really any better than what we had in the 90s.

http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/

So in yet another case of worse is better, wayland has the reputation of supporting mixed DPI environments, but not because it has any support for actual mixed DPI but because it is better at faking it (fractional scaling).

Some distros already do set lower defaults, e.g. pop os:

https://github.com/pop-os/default-settings/blob/master_noble...

Bazzite: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/system_files/d...

The performance difference will be minimal. It's an aesthetic choice, pick the one you like the look of or give a few of them a try.

It's like cars. Some people have extreme opinions on matters, some would be fine picking almost any car, and most test drive a few before picking their favorite.

What a bizarre conclusion to draw! Why don't you believe that whichever distro you choose, it will be way better than what you have now?

I like freedom and diversity. I don't want Linux to be like Windows or macOS with one window manager, one init system, etc. I like that people (and I) can experiment.

Is it less efficient than paying for Windows and macOS? Probably. Is it less polished? Certainly. But that's exactly what I want. If I wanted Windows or macOS, I would use Windows or macOS.

Wayland is a protocol with multiple different implementations.

Why do you believe that the developers of X failed to learn lessons from X when developing the replacement of X? Perhaps they learned lessons from X and decided to build it differently as a result?

It’s not that developers of those projects think this is the better path forward?

wlroots?

Plan 9 and later Inferno, just had plain 2D rendering.

Anecdotally, I’m using Plasma, and every Gnome or Gtk app I’ve tried appears to be working perfectly, and vice versa when I occasionally try out Gnome.

Much less so for DIY/BYOB desktops like Hyprland, but I feel like that’s what you sign up for there.

People worked - for free - on what they wanted to work on, and that is wayland. Who are you upset at?

There is this MAGA Linux Youtuber that is something to be studied on this topic, especially the community around it (some overlap with HN too), its basically just hate posting about woke, rust, systemd, python, mozilla, wayland, ubuntu, it goes on and on - https://www.youtube.com/bryanlunduke

I don't know why some hackers turned so reactionary it's so strange, I used to associate hacker culture more with leftism/anarchism/punks not conservative authoritarians or ancaps/libertarians.

I do wonder what the BSDs will do. The Wayland developers were the X developers. The problems with X all still exist.

How big a share of the desktop market do the BSDs have compared to Linux? I imagine it’s quite small, unfortunately.

If you are going to jump into Linux, dont sell yourself the weird delusion that using ancient ass systems is somehow going to be better for you.

People work on what they want to work on. There is no rule that people who worked on Wayland (and I happen to think they did a great job) would have worked on Xorg instead, or that the original motivations for building Wayland are invalid.

Care to elaborate on that accusation? I have a suspicion you're referring to Xlibre.

And there is no point is working on the Desktop security as long as X11 defeats it all.

> if it seems to be worth so little

I, for one, value the security standpoint.

Basically, to the degree I understand, the language was effectively forked into two.

Why?

I don't like systemd and the fact that mainstream distros push for it, but as a result I use a distro that gives me the choice (Gentoo). Who am I to tell the distro maintainer what they should do for free?

I think Perl5 was originally planned to be replaced by Perl6. Then Perl6 took much longer than anyone expected, and kinda ended up in a different place. Perl5 was re-anointed as the once-and-future Perl, and what had been Perl6 became Raku.

If I remember correctly, somewhere in the middle of all that there was talk of running Python (and other languages) on the new Perl6 VM.

I am saying that perhaps your experience has nothing to do with Wayland directly, so maybe you should still give Wayland a chance.

You can see many others in this thread contradicting the article’s complaints.

It has been 17 years.

    setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

I stopped my nostalgia journey short of pimping out my console (sadly now only fbcon works, and the old vga modes are a legacy BIOS thing I think) with fonts and higher resolution, and enabling in the kernel the Alt+SysReq+g key for dropping into the kernel debugger, but there is always tomorrow!

  set $laptop eDP-1
  set $landscape 'Hewlett Packard HP ZR24w CNT037144C'
  set $portrait 'Hewlett Packard HP ZR24w CNT03512JN'
  bindswitch --reload --locked lid:on output $laptop disable
  bindswitch --reload --locked lid:off output $laptop enable
  
  ### Output configuration
  output $laptop bg $HOME/pictures/wallpaper/1529004448340.jpg fill
  output $landscape bg $HOME/pictures/wallpaper/1529004448340.jpg fill
  output $portrait bg $HOME/pictures/wallpaper/portrait/DYabJ0FV4AACG69.jpg fill 
  # pos args are x coords and y coords, transform is degrees of rotation counter-clockwise
  # set $portrait as left monitor and rotate it counterclockwise
  output $portrait pos 0 1200 transform 270

Depending on your workflows the comment just described three issues

The vm.swappiness=1 was very necessary for me as well, and made as much difference as the dirties you'd mentioned.

I usually run Linus' master kernels (as I look for regressions in certain subsystems) and I know there's been some recent changes to the MM subsystem so this may explain some of the necessity for me.

That seems like a huge burden to carry around, considering that a minimal X11 window manager can be a few thousand lines of code and probably still compiles after 15 years.

You realize nvidia managed to ship proprietary drivers for linux, right? They really don't need the support

Click any protocol, very few outside the core and absolute essential extensions have universal support.

Good stats are hard to come by, but the Linux : BSD ratio is probably no larger than the Windows : Linux ratio (which is actually running relatively low these days--Linux seems to be closing in on ~3% desktop share). That puts the BSD overall in the 0.01% range, which is really too little market share to accurately measure.

Others said in this thread that Wayland in many ways was more so trying to solve issues for developers than for users and that's true.

Pulseaudio was a derail of Linux audio. We could have skipped it entirely.

https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/10...

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8170#issuecomment-3962...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1445kc7/citie...

In X11, the problem was Xserver. Now, X11's design philosophy was hopelessly broken and needed to be replaced, but it wasn't replaced. As you correctly point out, there is no "Wayland", Wayland is a methodology, a description, of how one might implement the technologies necessary to replace X11.

This has led to hopeless fracturing and replication of effort. Every WM is forced to become an entire compositor and partial desktop environment, which they inevitably fail at. In turn application developers cannot rely on protocol extensions which represent necessary desktop program behavior being available or working consistently.

This manifests in users feeling the ecosystem is forever broken, because for them, on their machine, some part of it is.

There is no longer one central broken component to be fixed. There are hundreds of scattered, slightly broken components.

"No, Linux isn't bad, your distro/DE is bad, if you used XYZ then you wouldn't have this problem." And then you waste your time switching to XYZ and you just find new problems in XYZ that you didn't have in your original distro.

I'm genuinely tired of this in the Linux community. You can't use the "Wayland" label only for the good stuff like "Wayland is good for security!" and "Wayland is the future" and then every time someone complains about Wayland, it is "no, that's not true Wayland, because Wayland isn't real."

For example Wayland supports far more than just “generic computer screen”. I’ve heard it was designed to be able to handle systems either multiple very different displays. Like maybe a normal screen and an e-paper display.

I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well.

Anyway, turns out computers really didn’t do that. We’re all still using one or more monitors that are mostly the same, with a couple of common aspect ratios.

Maybe they’ll be proven right. Maybe it’ll just be some extra stuff in the code forever.

Of course one of the ways you find out that you did something wrong was by doing it. So many comments online seem to just assume that the developers should’ve had the foresight to know everything they did that people don’t like or care about was wrong.

I feel real sympathy for both the developers and people with serious accessibility issues it has been a problem for.

But “beat up on Wayland” is practically a meme. An easy way to score points without looking at the big picture of how we got here.

rendering to a texture (an image) then displaying the image is what window compositors do, and what some games do. plan9 has a file you can write to which just dumps the image to the window/screen. there is no reason this could not work for Plan9. And if you don't want to open a file, write to it, then close it every frame, don't. implement a faster system. writing syscalls for plan9 is not difficult.

To create something like the GNU project, or OpenBSD, or Linux, takes serious levels of commitment. You really have to believe in it, and to a degree, you have to _will_ it into being. Along the way, you need to explain why your crazy idea is worth all the sacrifice, discourage those who would distract your team members, maintain your own and the team's focus through years of not actually having the thing you want in any useful form, etc, etc. You have to be an unreasonable person to take it on, and then continue it.

There are people who become "fans". They can be even more zealous than the project leader(s). Maintaining direction (aka control) of a horde of over-zealous fans takes aptitude and patience. It's easy, I think, for projects to devolve into vitriol, and denigration of those who think differently, even if it starts out from a good place.

All group endeavors are ultimately political. A group endeavor with a multi-year payoff period and no tangible rewards? It's bound to be very political.

That said, we all enjoy the fruits of their labors ...

To whatever degree the choices didn’t work out, which I think is likely overstated, they learned something. But if they just threw everything away again, people would be pissed. Again.

This all feels like so much Monday morning quarterbacking.

The DIY/BYOB experience is perfectly viable in the X11 world. I don't think I've ever had a piece of software balk at me because I used FVWM instead of kwin. I don't want to be railroaded into a desktop environment with strong opinions and mediocre tools when there's a sprawling flea maret worth of software to explore.

Also there's nothing about Linux or hacking culture that would be necessarily left or right wing. Maybe somewhat anti establishment with the desire for computing freedom (and in the west the left is firmly the "establishment", pushing the surveillance state forward).

I'm pretty sure it was due to nonfree codecs and drivers not being in other distros by default. The mainstream distros only have themselves to blame.

And Snap causes some embarrassing bugs in Firefox in the Ubuntu family, so people thinking "I want an Ubuntu-like OS but without Canonical's mistakes" still gravitate to Mint.

In the past Ubuntu was always my go-to but the snap thing was irritating, and I'd always used some kind of Debian variant, so after cycling through all the X-buntus said hey, why not this Linux Mint I keep hearing about? Plus, Cinnamon looked decent in screenshots but turned out Gnome with a few tweaks ended up being much closer to my ideal than even heavily customized Cinnamon.

(To any devs that may read this: I acknowledge a LOT of development progress and features you all have added, it's just not my cup of tea!)

I guess Kristian grossly underestimated the effort required to write a full features Display manager.

FWIW, innmy career the times I've had to perform very impactful changes in software, I always start from the current codebase and remove/simplify stuff.

As an example, once I was in a company that had built a huge Ruby monolith which was not scaling at all. It had APIs for everything, including "high frequency trading" in the same codebase server, under a METAL aws instance (that's how they scaled).

What we did initially was simply copy the repo N times (sign up, compliance, risk, trading, etc), spin up an copies of the same server and use a balancer to route APIs to the different boxes.

Then we started removing unused stuff from each of the repository to specialize them. Fiinally we simplified complexity on each separate codebase.

I would have approached X11 codebase similarly.

Every time something works as intended on the first try without me having to manually configure it first, it always feels like magic.

JACK doesn’t support device hotplug (ya know, connecting and disconnecting a headset, something most of us do) and it also doesn’t support multiple applications generating audio without the user having to configure how audio is mixed.

JACK is designed for low latency in environments like Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) where you know 1) what audio hardware is present at all times, and 2) what applications are going to generate audio.

Many people who use/used JACK ran a PulseAudio bridge on top of it for every application that wasn’t the one or two applications that needed ultra low latency audio.

PulseAudio had some major warts, but JACK wasn’t some panacea that did everything better.

My only “conclusion” is that Pop_OS 24.04 seems to be incompatible with having a desktop that just works.

Broadly, the X Server has a bunch of capabilities which are irrelevant. The modern model is really Window <-> Compositor based, and the X Server protocol is just a pointless middle man in that exchange.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1675200/announcements/detai...

If you're going to criticize, then at least make some constructive comments about how you think they SHOULD do it instead of just telling them to fork off.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/uwm.extensions.txt

  Date: Mon, 23 Feb 87 18:31:00 EST
  From: Don Hopkins <brillig.umd.edu!don@harvard>
  To: cartan!weyl.Berkeley.EDU!rusty@ucbvax.berkeley.edu
  Cc: xpert@athena.mit.edu
  Subject:  Uwm extensions, perhaps?

Setting a standard on any kind of key or mouse bindings would be evil. The window manager should be as transparent as possible. It solves lots of problems for it to be able to send any event to the clients. For example, how about function to quote an event that the window manager would normally intercept, and send it on?

Perhaps the window manager is the place to put the ToolKit?

-Don

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.x/c/qJO5IgI_7HU/m/J...

On September 19, 1989, Don Hopkins wrote on xpert@athena:

[...] I think it's a pretty good idea to have the window manager, or some other process running close to the server, handle all the menus. Window managment and menu managment are separate functions, but it would be a real performance win for the window and the menu manager to reside in the same process. There should be options to deactivate either type of managment, so you could run, say, a motif window manager, and an open look menu manager at the same time. But I think that in most cases you'd want the uniform user interface, and the better performance, that you'd get by having both in one process. I think it would be possible to implement something like this with the NDE window manager in X11/NeWS. It's written in object oriented PostScript, based on the tNt toolkit, and runs as a light weight processes inside the NeWS server. This way, selecting from a menu that invokes a window managment function only involves one process (the xnews server), instead of three (the x server and the two "outboard" managers), with all the associated overhead of paging, ipc, and context switching. [...]

I sometimes feel that people try to explain to Linux people how they should modify their distro in order to make it look more like Windows, such that they would get more newcomers who like Windows. I don't want that! People who like Windows should use Windows, and we should make Linux look like a system I left for Linux!

Their actions on systemd, Wayland, plus gnome and associated tech, sure look like classic “fire and motion”. Everyone else has to play catch-up, and they steer enough incompatible-with-alternatives default choices that it’s a ton of work and may involve serious compromises to resist just doing whatever they do.

Weston was only ever intended to be an example, and its monolithic nature meant that it wasn't particularly useful as a platform on which others could build (and this was even more true early on, before libweston).

As a result, GNOME and KDE both did their own implementations - and from that seed grew a host of complaints about things not working in one or the other, when on xorg they had worked more or less the same. The lack of a common entry point for "plumbing" also hurt, and can probably take much of the blame for the initial pain that many faced when first moving to a wayland-based DE.

But, of course, that's only obvious in retrospect. I don't think it was at all clear at the time those decisions were being made originally - in other words, it was a mistake rather than malice.

The other common example is that wayland is well-suited to AR/VR 3D compositing, and X... isn't.

> I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well.

It had better be well suited to cars, seeing as how it was significantly made for and by car companies. (I hear, at least; I'm told that it was significantly pushed forward precisely by companies developing automotive displays)

That is why they even have manifestos of their mission and such.

I don't trust blind appeals to authority.

> But if they just threw everything away again

No one suggested that.

> This all feels like so much Monday morning quarterbacking.

I don't like the system. I don't know what to tell you. I write a lot of X11 software. I don't really want to switch to writing Wayland software. The developers missed this point of view.

The adoption rate is unusual. I'm offering an explanation. I understand people consider it hostile to Wayland but I can't understand why. If you want to solve the fundamental problem, then I have to admit, I'm part of that problem, for the reasons stated. You can ignore them, but you'll have to live with an exceedingly slow adoption, which as the article points out, may be so long that it is replaced nearly the time it is finished. Which would not be ironic considering that's exactly what is happening to X11.

Again, I have nothing against leaving X11, but it should clearly be a hard sell to anyone who likes X11 to go to a platform that is actively hostile to some of it's well regarded core features.

Open source has become fractious. It feels intentional. I say all these things because I honestly wish it was not. If none of this had happened we'd have a genuine alternative to the commercial offerings, and given some of their choices lately, we could have greatly capitalized on that. Que bono?

I agree. But if you pretend there is there’s a big audience on one side ready to lap it up and give you ad views.

Do you? Not going to lie, I'm perfectly happy just using the apps I want to use and having none of them talk to each other. 90% of my use is covered by Vivaldi (browser stuff which is most stuff these days) and Kitty (Neovim, random TUIs and utilities). The few other apps I have are Steam, Krita and Blender, which are all worlds unto themselves and have no need to integrate with anything.

is the most technically true, practically meaningless argument in FOSS

But do you have the skill to actually maintain that fork? Do you have the time to keep it going?

Try to imagine how a Vulkan driver could be done on top of a plain file system interface.

Not one that kind of works, one that can match the performance of existing implementations.

Well, we also enjoy the issues. When you talk to them they are extremely uncompromising in practice and extremely tribalistic. I think “tribalistic” is maybe a better word for what I feel is an issue. “Not invented here syndrome” reigns supreme in open source and in general it's full of extreme fanboys who aren't willing to admit anything is wrong with “their tribe” and aren't willing to acknowledge any issue whatsoever and defend everything to the death.

The opposite is also just as true though. Many of the users and figureheads will believe everything is wrong with “other tribes” and refuse to acknowledge any of the merits and good ideas.

Proprietary developers have no allegiance but to money and there's something to be said for that. They just work for a company because it pays them and will switch to another company when they get a better contract there and in many ways that makes far less loyal and thus level headed about many things when talking to them.

When I think of the left i think of socialists and anarchists, the establishment you mean are liberals, meaning pro-market/privatization/etc. It always amazes me how the right was able to sell themselves as anti-establishment with the average politically uneducated person. The right also pushes the surveillance state forward, the most substantial surveillance legislation in US history, the Patriot act was bipartisan for instance.

It was a GUI install, defaults to KDE Plasma, auto installs and manages the graphics drivers. Very smooth, better than Windows install in most ways.

"compatibilities which are irrelevant" do exist, such as old drawing primitives but those are not really an issue. They can be maintained for backwards compatibility and eventually deprecated and removed, but they are not anything which holds back modern clients. The X server protocol is not anymore a "pointless middle man in that exchange" than the Wayland protocol is a "pointless middle man". A protocol is obviously needed so can not be pointless.

Seek help over your anger issues.

And I personally need kicad - it doesn't support Wayland at all because of some mouse-related stuff. Again, Wayland team thinks it's not their problem.

Then I had a lots of issues with a graphics tablet. Yes, it's a cheap chinesium knock-off, but it does work on X11. Wayland - no chance and it's obviously not their problem.

So I dropped Wayland altogether and went to X11/herbstluftwm. Was a few years ago, but I didn't bother to go back since - why should I? These aren't their problem, but now I don't use Wayland anymore, so these aren't my problem either.

What I'm trying to say, "hundreds of thousands of gamers stress-testing" have very little to say about usability. Yes the graphics part is excellent, nobody is denying that. There is more to a WM then graphics.

The code base is Xorg rather than Xfree86 because of one such fork.

Gcc went through the egcs fork.

OpenOffice became LibreOffice in a fork.

When leadership of a project fails to keep the volunteers behind them such forks happen.

Calling your posts garbage isn't an expression of anger. You should try being a little less sensitive when people mock you for saying dumb shit.

Wayland has broken dozens of my Steam games.

A guy decided that after getting all his patches rejected because they cause tests to fail, doesn't compile, etc. that the problem is everyone else and decided to fork XOrg.

He then announced that the problem wasn't his code that didn't compile but DEI so based the entire forking around being a political conservative.

Everything I've seen written by him shows him to be insufferable, thats where the negative attention comes from.

Then don't use "everything is a file" to do it. I already said that. Use shared memory, I don't care. I'm not talking about implementing anything on Plan9, I'm talking about implementing something new on Linux, instead of implementing Wayland.

> one that can match the performance of existing implementations

pretty easy if we're not talking about Linux anymore. FreeBSD can run Linux programs faster than Linux can, and given Plan9's size, if we wanted to do it there, we could perform even better than that.

The Unix philosophy is fragmentation into tiny pieces, each doing one thing and hoping everyone else conforms to the same interfaces. Piping commands between processes and hoping for the best. That's exactly how Wayland works, although not in plain text because that would be a step too far even for Wayland.

Some stuff should not follow the Unix philosophy, PID 1 and the compositor are chief examples of things that should not. It is better to have everything centralized for these processes.

It doesn't matter what you claim to think the left is, the left absolutely is the establishment. And if you think there's no authoritarian wing of the left you're either blind or lying. Leftist states are absolutely authoritarian, from the UK jailing people for social media posts to China to extreme examples like NK, Cuba and Venezuela.

> right also pushes the surveillance state forward

There's been recent news pieces here about stuff like age verification that is firmly coming from the left.

Both sides can be authoritarian or not. Libertarianism is a thing. And in many places in the world, Eastern Europe for example, anti-authoritarianism definitely has a "right-wing" lean due to a (hated) history of communism.

Linux definitely attracts those who don't like large corporations like Apple or Microsoft, but other than that there's a wide variety of beliefs (or even a lack of beliefs).

"... insane and technically incorrect ... idiotic lies ... you don't know what you are talking about ... SHUT THE HELL UP ..." - Linus Torvalds

https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/957

It's not just his code.

The COVID conspiracy theories Enrico Weigelt pushes are riddled with bugs, logical errors, and security holes, and don't compile or pass tests either.

Linus already reviewed both the code and the reasoning, and rejected them for failing basic correctness.

And? Fortunately, free speech and criticism doesn't stop when someone is tired of hearing it.

The alternative doesn't need to be some new solution. A course reversal or change on the existing ones is enough. In which case the criticism already highlights the solution. Besides, the first step of fixing a problem is identifying it.

Drop the ‘Steam’, it's cleaner. Wayland's raison d'etre is to push frame buffers without tearing. Input is an afterthought.

I wouldn't trust the reason given by the people who have said that they're trying to kill Xorg for why they're rejecting patches from someone trying to improve Xorg

California and New York are blue states that implement age verification, but Texas, Alabama and Utah for example also implemented similar laws, it IS bipartisan.

Its a pretty staggering how the right was able to brand themselves this way, the most ideologically authoritarian belief system and people think its 'muh freedom' they fight for. The most ironic thing to me is that in reality they are all just corrupt liberals paid for by the same oligarchy, the atrophied political discourse in the west exists solidly within the very narrow overton window of liberalism.

> NK, Cuba and Venezuela

Its like you think the democratic party or the UK Labor party is ideologically aligned with China, North Korea, Cuba or Venezuela? and your type gets upset that I call you politically illiterate. You will be very confused to learn the left hates Obama or Clinton as much as you do, just for very different reasons you will never understand. All that nonsense just makes you just a loyal soldier for fascists.

Apparently not.

This. You need more than graphics to have a windowing system. Wayland team threw out X11, did graphics and left the rest for the others to figure out.

No one says xlibre doesn't compile, but good attempt at a distraction. Have you considered invading a country as an alternative way to distract from terrible views?

Why not show my whole sentence in context? Address what I actually wrote? Instead of just making shit up...

I think this is actually the worst bad-faith comment I've seen on the internet, and that's saying something...

Wayland is certainly smaller than Plan9 but it is not smaller than Rio, and Rio is already designed and working. It might have been a great starting place and a real opportunity to rethink how Linux UIs work on a fundamental level. Putting syscalls in place of some of the files would not have been challenging. Changing how the mouse works would not have been challenging.

And if none of it worked, maybe we’d have a better idea about how to do the next thing. Software needs to change more. As software people, we get to define our own reality, and make reality benefit us rather than get in our way.

The people who wrote Plan9 knew that. Our industry has forgotten that. We keep working on old systems in old ways because that’s what we know. Because it’s easier than thinking about a new paradigm where the old rules don’t apply. I don’t care if it’s harder to do things in a smarter way. I care that things get better, and the only way to make things better is to do things in new ways. But we won’t do it and I don’t understand why we won’t.

Also are you running th Linux native one or the proton version?

I run everything through Steam with the proton compatibility layer forced. It's a steam client option somewhere.

I think they're an app called ProtonQT or something like that. It will enable you to easily download the latest proton-ge version. Once downloaded and installed you will need to restart the steam client, then restart the steam client again after selecting the new proton-ge version as the default.

---

https://www.protondb.com/app/255710

>> A guy decided that after getting all his patches rejected because they cause tests to fail, doesn't compile, etc. that the problem is everyone else and decided to fork XOrg.

Emphasis mine, words yours.

It is no accident that many of the most successful graphical technologies that originated in UNIX world, came from UNIX vendors that went beyond being yet another UNIX clone, like NeXT and SGI.

> Leftist states are absolutely authoritarian, from the UK jailing people for social media posts to China to extreme examples like NK, Cuba and Venezuela.

So what is the issue you are having with the sentence you quoted? You clearly identified them all as "leftist states". If "Leftist states are absolutely authoritarian", are right-wing states not?

Also I think its an insult to China to compare them in any way to the UK, yet another thing you will never understand.

Not the same as XLibre doesn't compile.