[0] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/

You're speaking as though there is someone out there operating without that capability, when my experience has been the opposite. If that was the case you'd hear about it in every single "Wayland is bad" video, instead of the usual focus on nvidia (which I also have no issues with, even using Prime).

what's the wayland equivalent to xclip that works on every WM ? e.g. `uuidgen | xclip -selection clipboard`

When I was talking about switching to wayland with a colleague, who was already moved over at the time, he tried to convince me that having no copy paste is better for security.

And I, using a password manager that generates unspeakably complex passwords everywhere, was kinda stunned by that blindsightedness.

If you don't want copy and paste, use Qubes OS. That's the philosophy matching the rest of the architecture of the OS.

But as long as you have a binary named "[" on your system, don't try to convince people that you are doing it in the name of security. There is much more rotten fish to throw away before that.

The only thing that recently convinced me to give wayland another go is hyprland. Seeing all kinds of nice WM concepts being implemented in it, maybe hyprland is "the interoperability specification" we needed all along.

Things like making the clipboard “intelligent” might help too. On macOS there’s a bit of this when copying passwords from the system password manager, where the clipboard is cleared either after paste or after some short period of time to reduce chances of grabby programs pulling it.

I think it shouldn't be too hard to hack in a dialog to password managers to confirm if the destination is correct before replying to the data request. But even without that one at least notices that a malicious/wrong application grabbed the password.

The problem that Wayland had is it took the stance of "just no!" and that means Wayland is now almost an adult (15 years, so a little time to go) and only just arrived at a place where a Wayland compositor is about as useable as an X11 based system (thanks Pipewire). Wayland has been a mess for so long I think even in Debian Bullseye swaywm didn't support Zoom (or any other program) screensharing. Which for 2022 was a remarkable gap in capability. I'm all aboard for the Wayland transition because it is a definite improvement, but Wayland's "security" debacle is a legendary case study in design gone wrong.

Counter question: would you have all C++ macros from libboost as symlinks on the filesystem, too? How would that work? /usr/bin/C++/[ and /usr/bin/bash/[ maybe? What's the difference of the operator behaviors, given that macros exist?

If you're not understanding where I am getting at: these types of hacks were the reason for a lot of fuckups and a lot of CVEs in the past. Directly or indirectly. I'd even encourage every distro to use busybox at this point, just for having a centralized entrypoint for your shell scripts.

  if test

  if [

But restricting commands to specific character sets also seems a bit cheesy to me. It seems more natural that a character is a character. I can see the other side here, though.

I'm curious about those CVEs. Surely any script involving the hijacking of `[` to obfuscate malicious code could also just as well have hijacked `test` (wherever `test` is not a shell built-in), right?

> I'd even encourage every distro to use busybox at this point, just for having a centralized entrypoint for your shell scripts.

For operating system scripts, I guess that's fine. But administrators who are writing their own scripts should choose a shell that's actually pleasant to read and write, and ship an appropriate runtime, including external commands. You can do this today in a portable way with Nix or Guix and a bit of footwork, just as well with bash as with Python.

If you're writing scripts in something other than your daily login shell, you might as well use a non-shell programming language, because you're now losing the advantage of writing in a language that you practice constantly. And BusyBox is not a pleasant daily login shell, so you shouldn't use it for that, either.

Yet, I’m back on Windows, I like well defined screen, I have a 4K another one of lower resolution, to handle that well, I need Wayland, heck KDE just sometimes has less features or less solved bug on X11 now.

And at night I just want to watch one or two things before sleeping, I just need to turn my screen to my bed, and choose one the suggestions of plateforms like YouTube or Netflix with my mouse. …Yet, sometimes I like to type something, it’s usually short so I just use and on screen keyboard program which I’ve still wait to find one that works for Wayland.

This is so dum, it’s crazy to me that we used to fly away from all the dysfunctions of Windows to go the sane Linux ecosystem to only find that is starting to look a bit absurd on that side too. And we look at the discourse of Wayland devs, they speak exactly like corporate would do.

So that and few package management breakage and I think this is also a weak point of the ecosystem, tends to break, to upgrade everything when you only need one thing, too complex too trouble shoot.We usually think we have superior technological paleform on with Linux kernel, but package management is one of the weak point IMO.

All of that pushed me outside of Linux for now.When I encounter something that looks infuriating on Windows, I just think I might see something like this on Linux.

Edit: typos

As for night time, I don't want or need my computer; I'll grab a tablet and consume all the content I want.

As for package management, let me know when I can type a single command on Windows and have my entire system and applications up-to-date.

I can only lament that it’s kind of the opposite for personal usage.

KDE Connect does: https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

You can turn your phone into a trackpad/remote keyboard, as long as your desktop is running the host software. Works just fine on Wayland, in my experience.

Overall I think people are right to blame Wayland for asking developers to reinvent the wheel, but wrong to defend the first-draft nature of x11. In a truly reductive sense, Linux never really had a desktop that worked. It was a desktop server that got hacked into usability by a lot of contributors, who ended up building a big unusable monolith. Naturally, a solution that is neither big nor monolithic is bound to make people angry.

But, I think we're past the point of lamenting x11's death. It was meant to be this way, Microsoft built Desktop Window Manager and Apple rolled out Quartz; sticking with x11 just didn't make competitive sense. Wayland's "big problem" is that it asks desktop developers to go the extra mile, and I don't really think that's a bad thing to ask. Linux didn't need taller, more fragile software stacks; it needs more thoughtful integration and actual diversity in implementation. It's not a coincidence that modern applications like the Steam Deck practically rely on Wayland to deliver such a customized experience.

I think people resort back to X11 because it’s only think that worked for a broad sets of features.Sure we can have Wayland making progress but it seems there’s little resource targeted it, not even implementation but even standardizing some things and we’re 15 years past. Linux kernel itself was already at infamous 2.6 version by then.

Sure proprietary desktops have kind of shown the way. One side, it’s good to have standards clear/clean enough that it can be easily implemented, on the other side, it can just be especially resource taking to redevelop things that are the core difference of the desktop environnement you might be developing.

I can wonder and worry, if we would have and will still ever see something like compiz fusion, the diagonal screen tick seen this year or anything else. Design standards api, inter app communication and make it customizable is no way easy and I feel like Wayland has absolutely not find how to articulate all of those things.

x11 has a place in my heart, I loved many of it's apps (shoutouts to xsnow) and cherished the wildly bloated featureset. But damn, it was broken. MacOS had a pretty terrible compositor for a while, but once you booted up Quartz with double-buffer V-sync (imagine, back in 2005) you would already know x11 was finished. Wayland was the inevitably long-winded response from the Open Source community, and while it languished for a long time it's finally quite usable.

Nobody is going to stop you from using x11, or maintaining it yourself if it comes down to it. The philosophy of the matter is decided, though; smaller featuresets are more secure and easier to implement. Especially since the advent of smartphones, I feel like the idea of an x11-native desktop metaphor has been nonsense. Yes, the GNOME pundits push this point pretty extremely, but there's a kernel of truth to it. We really do need more flexible desktop architectures if we want Linux to be a commercial-quality product. x11 is holding it back.

As a user I want to download the thing and run it. AppImages provide that.

As an app developer I want to create one single package that works everywhere that users can just download. AppImages provide that.

Snap and Flatpacks are solving problems that don't need solving for most people. Shitty sandboxing that doesn't even work and makes my app slower? I don't want it.

Most software is best installed by the native package manager. For the few exception AppImages are perfects.

If an app is so hard to distribute in any other way, that to me is a red flag that the app is not up to my quality standards or otherwise violates my sensibilities in some way. On my Linux desktop, I am very much in the camp of "that which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent".

(I fully recognize that I am extreme outlier in general, and perhaps a slight outlier among Linux users. Just offering one perspective, I make no claims that this it the correct perspective for most Linux users.)

I have run across the periodic application that violates both my quality standards and sensibilities, yet I find indispensable. An example here is the e-reader software KOReader. It makes zero sense as a desktop application since it is designed to run on dedicated tablets hardware with e-ink screens. It is not packaged by many distributions, likely because few people would be interested in maintaining such a package.

So why would I want to use it on a desktop? Because the breadth and depth of features are unmatched. In my case, I am willing to put up with a quirky black and white touch based interface[1] in order to have access to those features on my laptop. So I use the AppImage.

While I dislike the mentioned distribution formats for the reasons you mentioned, some software is so wonderful[2] that it's warts should be ignored.

[1] It does have keyboard controls. In verifying a couple of details for this post, I also discovered that it can be controlled from a gamepad. Connecting my laptop to a television and sitting back to read a book with only a gamepad in hand is something that I am going to have to try one day.

[2] And sometimes that wonderfulness extends beyond features. The lua based portions of KOReader are sufficiently clear that I was able to create a profile for an e-reader (tablet) that is so new to the market that it isn't yet supported in the release version (the e-reader is only about a month old, while release versions of the software come out every four to eight weeks).

This problem is exacerbated by things like the Canonical interview process where your hiring is intrinsically tied to having drank the whole koolaid and thinking it's the best thing around

We need a linux distro made by people who hate linux. People who buy no excuses. Maybe then things will work

Android only managed to get where it got by keeping the kernel and ditching most of linux userspace

The missing piece is perhaps some sort of AppImage installer which can be registered as the handler for the AppImage filetype. When ran it could read metadata (packaged as part of the AppImage?) and generate the support files. Ideally would also maintain a database of changes to be rolled back on uninstall and provide a PackageKit or AppStream provider to manage updates with your DE's store.

Now none of that addresses dependency duplication, but thats clearly not in scope for AppImage.

ossia score's AppImage is 100 megabytes: https://github.com/ossia/score/releases/tag/v3.2.0

Inside, there's:

- Qt 6 (core, widgets, gui, network, qml, qtquick, serial port, websockets and a few others) and all its dependencies excluding xcb (so freetype, harfbuzz, etc. which I build with fairly more recent versions than many distros provide)

- ffmpeg 6

- libllvm & libclang

- the faust compiler (https://faust.grame.fr)

- many random protocol & hardware bindings / implementations and their dependencies (sdl)

- portaudio

- ysfx

with Flatpak I'd be looking at telling my users to install a couple GB (which is not acceptable, I was already getting comments that "60 MB are too much" when it was 60 MB a few years ago).

> As a user I want to download the thing and run it. AppImages provide that.

Because Linux userspace libraries aren't designed to handle long term binary compatibility. There is no guarantee that a simple package upgrade or a simple distro version upgrade will not break things.

There is no guarantee that an Appimage will continue working 3 months later. If it relies on web communication, there is no guarantee that the application will stay secure since you have to bundle core system libraries like OpenSSL with your application (unlike Windows and MacOS).

I will even go and say especially GNU stuff is made specifically to make reasonable (imo at least 5 years) binary only i.e. closed-source software friendly distribution hard.

It is the culture adopted by all middle layer libraries and desktop environments too. The only supported form is source and every piece of software in Linux world assumes it is built as a part of an entire distro.

That's why Snap and Flatpak actually install a common standardized base distro on top of your distro or why Docker in its current form exists (basically packaging and running entire distro filesystems).

Only way to get around it is basically recreating and reengineering the entire Linux userspace as we know it. Nobody wants to do that.

Creating long term stable APIs that allow tweaking is very difficult, requires lots of experience in designing complex software. Even then you fail here and there and forced to support multiple legacy APIs. Nobody will do that unless they are both very intelligent and paid well (at the same level as an Apple, Microsoft or Android engineers). It is not fun and rewarding most of the time.

And neither method really works for the desktop usecase, because one expects things to actually integrate with the desktop, and that often requires IPC, not just dynamic libraries. So if you bundle an entire filesystem with all libraries you've made things WORSE. Accessibility & I-Bus will break almost guaranteed every other release...

The OpenGL drivers are also similarly dynamically loaded by libglvnd at runtime. Otherwise universal graphics drivers won't work. It'll be going back to the bad old days booting into black monitors when changing GPUs and then trying to figure out drivers in the TTY.

High performance data transfers like real-time audio, graphics buffers, camera data etc still has to use the lowest level possible i.e. shared memory. Dynamic libraries really help for having simpler APIs for those.

And then there is the update problem. If all programs are statically linked, a single update will easily reach gigabytes per upgrade for each CVE etc. The distro maintainers has to be extremely careful that they didn't miss to upgrade a dependency.

I think most people don't like AppImages mostly because they don't provide any sandboxing. I think that's a silly reason myself, but I'm also an old, and us olds aren't terrified of using our computers like the youngs seem to be ;-). Though, other OSes are getting sandboxing for applications and Linux needs to not get left behind, so I'm glad it's being solved.

I also think fragmentation is a (valid) reason people dislike AppImage also. It's nothing wrong with AppImage specifically, but that its existence harms adoption of Flatpak by making it easy for people to not use Flatpak. Personally I see them occupying different niches. I use App Images for things like Kdenlive, Logseq, Upscayl, and UHK Agent. Those could all be Flatpaks, but developer effort matters. If devs provide an App Image build I think we should be praising them from the rooftops for caring about Linux!

Another reason is that it clashes with immutable OSes like Fedora Silverblue or SteamOS that are heavily container-based.

What I'd love to see is a tool that takes an App Image and automatically builds it into a Flatpak (possibly with predefined metadata). Flathub could easily be populated this way so that it's easy for developers/distributors to package and ship, but also Flatpak is the standard.

it should have been very telling to the linux community that Microsoft with all its mighty billion dollars wasn't able to force sandboxing on the users with WinRT and had to backtrack and allow Win32 apps again. Hell, people moved to linux because MS tried that.

But sandboxing isn't a requirement on Linux, its an optional distribution method. When you look at a console like the Steam Deck, that system practically requires you to use Flatpaks for third-party software because the OS is an immutable image. If you install anything through pacman it will be wiped on the next OS upgrade.

It is an unquestionable mistake to conflate packaging/distribution and runtime sandboxing into a single solution. These are different problems that fundamentally have nothing to do with each other. There are great solutions for sandboxing that don't care how an application is installed, and solutions for packaging that don't force a specific sandboxing solution on you. This failure to separate concerns is one of the primary disadvantages of Flatpack.

Concerning AppImages: I have no interest at all in them and although Flatpak still has its share of problems, basically all important communities adopted it (but Ubuntu).

Flatpak integrates in your system, has sandboxes, has automatic updates, shares dependencies etc.

Is Flatpak perfect or running w/o problems? Certainly not.

But IMHO AppImages add nothing over Flatpak, but lack the unified infrastructure and integration into packet managers etc.

We all would benefit from agreeing on one standard, and by now it looks like Flatpak is that one standard. So, I don't want to download random AppImages from the internet, I want a certified Flatpak which integrates with my system.

(Being a member of the Linux community for longer than most people using Linux are alive by now, of course and invetible, once Flatpak is working and established, it will be replaced by some broken other solution. :-P)

AppImages are good for certain use case. Recreational vehicles are also good for certain use cases. But just as a I don't live in RV parked in my garage when I'm at home, I don't use AppImages as my primary way of running locally-installed software on my main system.

> As an app developer I want to create one single package that works everywhere that users can just download.

You should just release source tarballs (or static binaries if you're not FOSS), and let the distros do their job of packaging and distributing the software. AppImages are fine to maintain in parallel for specific use cases, but I just want normal software binaries running in the OS environment I've already set up to my liking, not embedded in someone else's encapsulated runtime environment that's inconsistent in dozens of ways from my system config.

> Most software is best installed by the native package manager. For the few exception AppImages are perfects.

Exactly. But static builds are far superior to AppImage.

FWIW my package manager of choice is GNU Guix, which solves all of the same problems as snap and flatpak in a much more elegant way.

Loudly declaring your ignorance is not an opinion. If really cared, you would go look at the large volume of the well-thought-out complaints. But you don't.

The fundamental problem is that AppImages are literally just an archive with a bunch of files in them, including libraries and other expected system files. These files have to be selected by the developer. It's really hard to tell which libraries can be expected to exist on every distribution, which libraries you can bundle and which ones you absolutely cannot due to dependence on some system component you can't bundle either, or things like mesa/graphics drivers. There's tools to help developers with this, "linuxdeploy" is one, but they're not perfect. Every single AppImage tutorial will tell you: Test the AppImage on every distribution you intend this to run on.

At the end of the day, this situation burdens both the developer (have I tested every distribution my users will use? both LTS and non-LTS?) as well as the user (what is this weird error? why isn't it working on my system?), and even if this all somehow works, newer versions of distributions are not guaranteed to work.

Flatpak, for all its bells and whistles, at least provides one universal guarantee: Whatever the developer tests, is exactly what the user will experience. I think this is a problem that needed solving for many people.

...it hurts a lot to say this as a longtime flatpak avoider, still always prefer distribution packaging, but I've come to accept that there's a genuine utility to flatpak, if only to cover for letting users test different versions of software easily, and similar situations that distributions just cannot facilitate no matter how fancy their package manager.

After using Ubuntu for years, this change made myself and many others I know switch. I've been on MX for the past two years and love it.

Also antix has a hyperlink which clicking would have answered your question as to what antix is.

I use AppImages when I want a specific version of a specific app. I never want them to be automatically updated because doing so might introduce breaking changes that might mess with my workflow. Imagine complex software like Blender or Krita updating automatically while you working on a specific project, possibly even breaking your saves, absolute horror.

Yes. And no.

About 70-80% of AppImages I downloaded in the past didn't even start. 100% of my installed Flatpaks have been running fine on any distro I tried. I would love a world where Flatpak was redundant, but it very clearly isn't.

To me that also raises the issue of Snap/Flatpacks and Wayland both handling part of sandboxing/capabilities. Ultimately if you want to handle how your apps can be run and got resort back to lower primitive and you’re handling very different things like files acces(Snap/Flatpacks) and visual elements(Wayland) and maybe got back to the Linux kernel to handle that.

I'm on an immutable distribution (Fedora Kinoite) so installing native packages is discouraged. I have everything running in Flatpaks, even Steam and all games. I haven't experienced any performance impact. I think Snaps do something weird with squashfs, but Flatpaks just set up and manage symlinks to dependencies via ostree.

I.e. If I want to set up a script that makes Libreoffice trigger phone calls through a bluetooth modem, I should be able to. Otherwise it isn't really a computer. These "system" vs "non-system" almost always end up down this slippery slipe, and avoiding it is one of the reasons I enjoy desktop Linux for all its brokenness.

I've made up half a dozen definitions for it before asking, and none of them were a good guide to decide about the software on my machine. Yours seems to focus on the DE components, what is both way too restrictive (why are `ls` or `test` out?) and way too inclusive (my DE installs with an Earth rendering and graphic calculator, my workplace's DE installs with CandyCrush).

It is in fact applied by organizations, and they manage fine, so lack of a universal definition isn’t a hindrance.

If you want to guarantee certain versions of ls or test are available for the duration of the supported life of an OS, yeah, they’re part of the base system. This kind of arrangement is very nice for both users and software vendors. The base-system instability of an Arch or a Gentoo (rolling release), or the ancient productivity-software packages of a Debian, aren’t the only options—lockstep-release stable base system and rolling release user packages are an option.

But there's been improvements. The winget CLI can now install and update several well-known applications, and even upgrade them when you first downloaded them any other way. There's also the MSIX package format, which is much closer to distro packages or mobile apps, can auto-update without a central repository and supports sandboxing.

Nowadays, even if still a bit hacky, I definitely consider Windows packaging less painful than the mess that is Linux distribution. Packages in distro repositories are regularly outdated, and every other package is installed misconfigured or has been patched in unclear ways by the distro maintainers; then there's Flatpak which make for gigantic installs with clunky sandboxing, or AppImages.

And don't be fooled by the name of the release: "Testing". The name "Testing" exists due to an orthodox approach of Debian community that only the Debian stable can use "stable".

Usually it works like this (forced to use macOS at work and Windows from time to time for special software): One installs some software from trusted websites (VSCode, VLC, Firefox, etc.) on macOS/Windows, and then when one just wants to get some work done: Update-PopUps, yay. They annoy the hell out of me, especially because there is no unified system for macOS/Windows. Break my flow, wait for download, privilege escalation, installation and starting again. Thank you very much. This happens multiple times a week especially for packages like VSCode, VLC, Office, Outlook, Firefox, KeepassX, Calibre... packages which you don't want to be outdated, ever. It is f*cking ridiculous that I have to take care of this BS in 2024.

On my Linux boxes I login and work. Updates have been silently downloaded and installed for the packages and/or flatpaks and everything is up to date, no annoying update-popups which break my flow and I know that I have the latest version of all software especially security sensitive packages.

At the end, you can pick your poison.

Having integrated/working package management with silent updates is one of my killer features of Linux/Flatpak. I want to set it up one time (automatically) and never have to think about or deal with it again.

I think they are all worse than the other packaging methods

With a NixOS configuration I can install almost all software I use in a single command

Even in window I mostly use scoop/chocolatey

> It's now up to each desktop environment project (e.g. GNOME or KDE Plasma) to develop their own full featured GUI for tablet configuration.

That doesn't sound ideal.

When I tried installing Linux on there, I had a ton of trouble getting Wayland to work in any capacity (it was very glitchy when I tried), and I had to go back to X, before nuking the Linux install and going back to macOS.

3 year old Lenovo laptop with Intel Integrated plus Nvidia dedicated on Ubuntu connected to external HDMI and Displayport standard 1080p monitors and built in laptop monitor, and an old PC with old dedicated Nvidia on AntiX(Debian) connected to old 17" VGA LCD monitor. Nothing fancy. Screen tearing on all of them.

Anyway, the out of the box experience is shit on this front. Screen tearing shouldn't be a thing anymore. It's not like those GPUs were some exotic prototype HW nobody else has to need hours of reding forums and tinkering with .conf files to get rid fo screen tearing.

2) If I were using a batteries-included distro,

  Section "Device"
    Identifier "AMD"
    Driver "amdgpu"
    Option "TearFree" "on"
    Option "VariableRefresh" "on"
  EndSection

> Option "TearFree" "on"

reminds me of a pdf viewer at some point had an option to "respect permission" or something, you could turn it off and ignore the limits on the pdf that the author set.

Ready means if everything is flawless to MacOS/Windows levels, where you never have to think about display server compatibility, and that's where X11 is still king despite the performance shortcomings. At least it always just works™ and compatibility beats performance most of the days.

I could excuse it if it had been 4 years old or so, but it's old enough already it can drink and smoke in Europe.

Xorg was a fork of XFree86, which was released in 1991. So that codebase was 17 years old when Wayland was first released. I don't think the date of the fork is what's relevant here.

I could also argue that you should be comparing the Wayland protocol (2008) vs the X11 protocol (1987), or even older versions of X (1984).

If that game were to be launched today and feature a setting in the same time delta, it would be set in 2008 when movies like The Dark Knight or the first Iron Man launched.

How time flies.

I did not try the switch to Wayland; I've actually tried installing the packages as recommended in the wiki, but despite that launching a session just fails and sends back to sddm, so I haven't tried much more. According to his guide, I won't try before a long time.

  pacman -Syu --ignore linux,linux-headers,linux-api-headers

I'm quite glad it works for me now, and I feel bad for everyone who's usecase is not yet catered for.

There's a pending Mutter MR[1] to allow XWayland applications to handle the scaling themselves (which IntelliJ IDEs can do) but it hasn't been merged yet, and I'm probably never gonna see it on 24.04 anyway. Apparently KDE already supports this, but the Gnome folks have been reluctant to adopt the same approach.

I ended up going back to 100% scaling, increasing the system font size, and then setting `GDK_DPI_SCALE=1.25` in `/etc/environment` to tell all GTK programs to increase their scale. It's not perfect, but most things are the right size. I definitely would not have wanted to switch to Wayland any sooner than this though. Transitional periods are such a pain.

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3567

I hadn't really used KDE much before that, but KDE 6 is a solid release.

Love that they're fixing the screen though. It's fine for me since I solved it the first time, but it's hard for most people at first. I just enabled "Large Text" in Gnome's accessibility menu and that gets it pretty good. If you want to really hone it in though, enable fractional scaling[1] and then tweak the scaling factor.

What I do after a fresh install (with Fedora but should work with most any new-ish Gnome):

[1]: `gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"`

I am generally pro-Wayland when it'll work, but against stucking Wayland into my throat and ordering me to abandon my routines, telling me they were no good. And this is what is happening right now with a lot of "enlightened" people.

What is the freedesktop group doing? I thought this was their area.

Us Wayland skeptics were always right.

Again -- I know I'm old, but it still boggles my mind how accepting LINUX people became of breaking backward compatibility in this situation. Like, the opposite of that was our whole thing.

It does matter who is willing to work on code. And no one is willing to do the work on the X11 codebase that it needs.

That's it. Plain and simple.

Forking X11 and assuming Vulkan while throwing out everything else is probably pretty doable and would result in a 90% codebase reduction. However, nobody is willing to sling the code to make it happen.

OTOH, there are people willing to add support for old hardware that probably can't run Vulkan, or even OpenGL, and sometimes they manage to upstream that code. With your "bsder" nick, the following example seems relevant.

https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/x_org_on_netbsd_the [search "PowerPC"]

Some old X11 coders still work on it, or make suggestions to improve it.

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2024-April/061644.html

https://keithp.com/x-ideas/

But such initiatives lack the "new shiny bling" factor, which seems to be a must nowadays to be a "success". It's the curse of "mostly done, mostly maintenance" projects in a world where breaking ground looks better in a CV than polishing and oiling the machinery others crafted.

> Forking X11 and assuming Vulkan while throwing out everything else is probably pretty doable and would result in a 90% codebase reduction. However, nobody is willing to sling the code to make it happen.

The easy way is to move to just using rootful XWayland, which lets you use the fancy new backend while keeping everything else the same. IMHO they really should have implemented that first, moved everyone to the new backend, and then if they really had to push pure Wayland do that after.

And as such, the Wayland project is the ONLY one that ends up reliably generating the usual e.g. "WELL YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE AN OPINION BECAUSE YOU DONT WORK ON IT YOURSELF" type of retorts.

They're really weird because -- on one hand they're technically true. But on the other, they don't really explain why SO MUCH OTHER free/open source software doesn't have the extreme backwards compatibility breakage that this does.

Why do we get the free magic of people making great backward compatible code with other projects and so painfully not with this one? To me, THATS the interesting question, and cutting it off with WELL, YOURE NOT DOING IT SO YOUR OPINION DOESNT COUNT just is weirdly unhelpful.

I can invert your question to: "Why is it that so many people complain so loudly about the X11/Wayland thing and yet so few step in to sling code?"

These projects are relatively old. People know what is broken in X11/Wayland; pointing that out doesn't help very much. What isn't always obvious is how to fix what is broken.

What's left to do is hard. The easy stuff has been done. The grindy but straightforward stuff has also mostly been done. So, what's left is the stuff that is both a lot of work and not at all straightforward.

Given that, what value is there is anyone that isn't bringing code?

If the problem needs a mass of work, the only thing valuable to be brought to the table is code. Alternatively, if somehow a brilliant insight got missed by a ton of experienced people, the only thing that can break the logjam and demonstrate superiority is code.

I'm no fan of Wayland and think it is very much the wrong direction. However, if I'm not willing to commit time, people or money to fix the situation, how much weight does my opinion really carry at the end of the day?

And I explained what the difference is.

These projects are old and difficult. Most open source projects are neither.

There are very similar problems with open source domain-specific tools, for example (Musescore, GIMP, FreeCAD, KiCad before CERN decided to fund it, etc.).

Musescore has a nice video about how hard fixing it was and how hard it was to get to Version 3 and then trying to get it to Version 4 and how lucky they sometimes had to get: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qct6LKbneKQ

That code doesn't write itself. It needs someone motivated to write it.

As someone who reverse engineered a video card and wrote an entire X11 driver almost 3 decades ago, I get this painfully. If I wanted it done, I had to do it myself.

Both X11 and Wayland have some fundamentally wrong architectural choices. The problem is that both X11 and Wayland are sufficiently "good enough" that the activation energy to get traction above either of them is huge. It's a gigantic pile of grunt work until you get to the fun stuff, and nobody who isn't paid money by a company can muster the motivation to overcome it. And people paid by companies are going to solve the problems they are being paid to solve and not much else.

Open source, in general, is having a problem with being stuck in "local minima". Lots of things are good enough to gain sufficient social traction that replacing them with something better is ferociously difficult. (package managers, git, dynamic libraries ... I can go on and on and on ...)

It's part of the reason why I don't try to interfere with the "Rewrite It In Rust(tm)" brigade even when I think it's a silly idea. It is now a bigger problem to corral the motivation to do something in open source than gaining the technical skill to do it.

You are right that we can't force wayland dev work on x11 -- all I ask is don't push their new work as default.

That says a lot about the state of those two projects.

It was definitely more recent then 12 years ago. Maybe it wasn't mandriva but it was a kde based distro. I prefer KDE and many of the recommended ones are RPM based so recently I tried many of them but their installations were far more limited compared to Linux Mint/Ubuntu/MX and the resulting system didn't feel like something I had much control over.

Curiosity: What would you recommend then, for someone who doesn't want to be ignorant or complacent?