Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

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Systemd by itself is alright, the problem for me is the larger movement from "Linux is about choice" to tightly integrated, opinionated tools. Examples:

- Gnome started to depend on systemd features. Now non-systemd systems become second class citizens.

- You used to be able to freely swap out window managers, taskbars, and so on, because everything was working with common standards. In the modern world, everything is integrated in your wayland compositor, and if you want to change the way window decorations look, you will also have to change everything else. Systemd is similar, it wants to take over so many responsibilities (task scheduling, DNS, session management), and if you want to swap out one part it is going to be difficult.

- Pulseaudio, NetworkManager, Polkit: Written in the same spirit, in part from the same people. Work great if everything works as expected, if they break it is a nightmare to figure out why. But code depends on them, so they become de facto standard on desktop linux.

Linux has never been about choice. There was choice because no two people could agree on a set of protocols and standards. And slowly we're converging on a small set of decent (not perfect!) ideas volunteers can focus their efforts on. I honestly hope the choice meme dies because it is so toxic.

My Linux workstation and servers are not something I want to tinker with, I want solidity and stability and a fragmented user space ecosystem is not the solution.

"linux" (as in: Unixoid distributions for desktop systems) has always been about choice. Debian's update-alternatives, the whole FreeDesktop project, ICCCM standards. The theming community, gnome-look.org, kde-look.org, and so on.

If I want the stabilty and flexibility of Linux (the kernel) and the GNU command line tools, and the flexibility to choose a UX paradigm that I prefer and visuals that I like, I go to desktop Linux. In that sense, choice is the USP of linux (linux as in: desktop distribution). If I loose the flexibilty, I go back to Windows or Mac. Opinionated ("not fragmented") systems like Gnome only work if you're fully on board with their choices. If not, then there is really no benefit for me over just sticking with windows.

Now, on a server the situation is of course different, and stability is paramount. I like for example that services are declarative and not imperative in systemd. But on a desktop, I don't really care.

> "linux" (as in: Unixoid distributions for desktop systems) has always been about choice.

Again, no. You call it choice, I call it chaos, it was anarchy, and that's the default state for any loosely-coupled systems. There is no manifesto, no underlying philosophy that decided that yes, Linux is about choice. Don't conflate lack of organisation with choice.

Linux has always been about creating a libre UNIX-like kernel for x86 processors. And converging toward the same set of libre techonologies isn't against the Linux spirit.

I still don't understand why people keep harping on about choice. I've used Linux full time since 2001, and the anarchy has just made a libre desktop an utopia because everyone wants every software to support every single option, with no understanding that the number of bugs scales exponentially with the number of choices.

> I still don't understand why people keep harping on about choice.

Because they don't want the choices other people made for them.

Fragmentation is not a skippable problem though. And especially when you depend on lower level services, choice without a standard interface will create an exponential explosion of should-be-supported APIs, which is terrible for an already thin community.

> Linux has never been about choice. There was choice because no two people could agree on a set of protocols and standards. And slowly we're converging on a small set of decent (not perfect!) ideas volunteers can focus their efforts on. I honestly hope the choice meme dies because it is so toxic.

So everyone who uses or develops alternative init systems like runit and openrc and alternative DEs like KDE and package managers like apk and pacman should just stop and work on and use systemd, GNOME, and flatpak instead because that is the One True Way of using Linux on desktop?

Quite a power trip attitude I'd say. I can't imagine why I would use Linux if choices I don't agree with were shoved down my throat.

Wayland doesn’t mandate anything, it’s a goddamn protocol to put a rectangular window’s content to the screen. It is also freely extendable and has a very sane feature discovery in-built so basically any additional functionality can be created through a simple API (and many such exist already)

But can you run a remote application from another machine on your own machine? This is my biggest obstacle with Wayland. Xorg did it perfectly.

Yes you can with proper compression and usual streaming. X is no longer network transparent anyways (everyone uses proper GPU-acceleration with a litany of bitmaps so it’s not as easy as serialize drawing commands)

So if I SSH into my remote machine, with the appropriate forwarding agents and wayland in place I can run evolution?

Ok I will give that a go.

That reminds me when will Wayland be able to support disparate displays say one big display on 4k with 30 bit colour and two others on QHD and 24 bit colour?

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