I check the state of the linux world about once a year still. And obviously keep using it on the servers.
Best of luck to everyone using it for desktop. I totally get why you do it, but it's just not for me right now.
X11 problems explained by Daniel Stone [1]. As I understand there are two parallel architectures, one uses X11 server primitives (xfontsel), another renders on client (fontconfig fc-list etc). It is very confusing.
Upgrades often break things, I'm forced to use brew to install software which leaves files strewn around the file system and regularly seems to have cross package conflicts.
And don't get me started on the hardware - the laptop is excessively heavy and the keyboard is awful (and I don't just mean the touch bar gimmick).
My personal laptop is a Lenovo Carbon X1 and Fedora runs very nicely on it, requiring very little thought put into management if you're running the default desktop (Gnome). I can update the firmware and BIOS from inside Linux, and Lenovo have even started shipping newer versions of the laptop with Fedora pre-installed.
There's massive scope of tinkering with Linux if you want to, but as long as you're careful with the hardware you buy there's absolutely no need to tinker at all if you don't want to.
There is nothing so special going on in Fedora that can’t be done in other distros. Try an Arch based Linux desktop. You’ll get newer packages and better package management. Manjaro has worked well for me.
You either fix them yourself and contribute back if possible. Or switch to distribution where someone still fixes these issues.
I've investigated X.Org caused bug just for two days and since then totally support Wayland development. What we have today is not healthy.
The wayland people replaced that with a half-baked solution because they insisted on boiling the ocean - replacing the entire thing in one go, instead of working piecemeal (which the X protocol was explicitly designed to allow).
Which is a great pity, because now the day of the Linux Desktop is even further off.
> instead of working piecemeal
That's exactly what happened. Do you remember fonts without anti-aliasing? Run xfontsel, that's X11 fonts rendering. Freetype, Fontconfig, Cairo, Pango, HarfBuzz work on client side and push pixels to X Server. Entire rendering model changed, X.Org become compositor. They've faced limits, they've implemented DRI, DRI2 [1].
Now developers decided to make good compositor. And they've done it without disturbing X11 ecosystem, with clean way to port toolkits. Window Managers can't be ported but they can be reimplemented, just look how many compositors people built [2]. It is a miracle.
Linux future is bright. Video drivers moved from X Server to kernel, display configuration parts replaced by KMS, we've got modern font rendering, text shaping, we've got open source AMD GPU driver!
I still use Intel GPU, X.Org and xmonad, but the times they are a changing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Infrastructur...
On a 200 dpi display the xfontsel display looks better. :)
The irony.
I run one, which is why to me the irony feels reversed to what you probably meant. It's clumsy, slow and tedious to setup.
[1] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst [2] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [3] https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon