Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

People will (and have) showed up to deny this, but what you describe is common enough that it can't be untrue.

At this very moment, I'm still going through the "play" phase. If you pick a distro and then never change anything about it, then maybe it will work out for you out of the box. But as soon as you try to "make it yours", suddenly you'll find yourself with a second day job with no pay, you'll wonder where all your free time went, and your muscle tone will be gone. Inevitably, you'll have some weird issue like a particular program acting slow and causing the mouse to lag, or maybe your Wayland compositor has the wrong cursor position, and nobody on the internet knows why, except for some guy with a script as long as the declaration of independence that you can run in your terminal to fix all your problems (um, no). Eventually you give up and run the built-in compositor within another compositor, and somehow that fixes the original issue. But now your keyboard/mouse configuration no longer works! Holy shit, it's almost Christmas? Screw this, let's install Debian stable. Wait, what? The installer can't find the installation media? You ARE the installation media! Fuuuuuuuuu...

I love Linux as a tool, but the desktop experience will never get its act together. Whether it works for you or not seems to be based on luck. I don't even want a complicated desktop experience; I just want something basic like Openbox and a web browser, but these days you can barely even do that without a bunch of tinkering (unless you want to stick entirely to X11).

It seems like the problem that makes it common is that Linux self-selects for people who want to tinker (that's why they're installing a non-default OS). The difference is that it also accommodates people who reach a point where they just want the computer to work and get out of their way. So you end up hearing both voices.

> If you pick a distro and then never change anything about it, then maybe it will work out for you out of the box.

Yes, exactly. Use a stable distro, don't touch things, and they won't change. It will continue to run exactly the same for years and years. This is in contrast to OSX and Windows. Windows is completely unrecognizable to me since stopped using it 7-8 years ago (the last version I used being Windows 7). My Linux desktop works exactly the same (with Firefox as an outlier that randomly removes/hides functionality). Apple is notorious for not caring about backwards compatibility, and just expecting everyone to accommodate whatever changes they want to make.

> unless you want to stick entirely to X11

Right, don't change things, and it will keep working. Wayland sounds like its benefits are all nerd stuff that I don't care about (a "better" architecture or whatever). Meanwhile, X works just fine. At some point, if people stop complaining about Wayland, and if it has some benefit to me, maybe I'll try it. Currently it seems that neither of those criteria are met. When I do try it, if it doesn't work, I'll just roll it back.

Another part of the problem (for me) is I would get something like an LTS setup the way I want (a CentOS or an Ubuntu LTS, but I honestly can't recall exactly what I was running on my desktop at the time) and it would be rock solid for years - until it finally was old enough (or out of support) and I wanted to install something new and I had to upgrade - and which point I get five years of changes right to the face, and spend a week or more tinkering everything to how I wanted it.

>Yes, exactly. Use a stable distro, don't touch things, and they won't change. It will continue to run exactly the same for years and years. This is in contrast to OSX and Windows. Windows is completely unrecognizable to me since stopped using it 7-8 years ago (the last version I used being Windows 7).

Unless you're willing to use Flatpak though, you'll be stuck with old versions of applications because user applications in the Linux world are typically tightly coupled to the system packages.

Right but that's the point. I'm fine with my stuff being out of date. I'm not trying to tinker. I don't need to use the latest versions of things because the current ones work fine. If there were something new I really wanted, then I can use one of those containerized versions until it lands in my distro's stable channel, which is every 6 months or so for feature releases.

> Wayland sounds like its benefits are all nerd stuff that I don't care about (a "better" architecture or whatever).

Kind of.

If you have a Retina display, for instance, Wayland is superior out of the box. Unless an application is written all stupid, it has a good chance of rendering at the correct scale while looking crisp. It's possible to do this with X11 or Xwayland, but I found it requires more tweaking of individual app settings and GTK environment variable to get it to look right. But even then, try using both X11 and Wayland apps together and get both kinds to look right on your HiDPI display without one or the other looking fuzzy or incorrectly scaled. I found it virtually impossible, thus it's better to just go with either one or the other. Although I think it would have been better to actually fix X11, Wayland does actually do most things better. HiDPI is one of them, and the other is vsync. I haven't seen Wayland cause horizontal tearing, but X11 always gave me this issue. A popular Stack Exchange question titled "Why is video tearing such a problem on Linux?" was written by me as a result of having tried my best to get my Linux installations to not experience horizontal tearing but inevitably failed no matter what display or graphics card I was using. I'm glad that someone in the Linux sphere decided to take vsync seriously and make it a non-issue with Wayland.

The average person doesn't need to know about Wayland, especially if they are going with a Wayland-based distro and not changing anything about it.

The only reason one would need to know about it, besides if they are writing a compositor, is if they are trying to customize their Linux distribution. In that case, they may be in for a world of hurt, because it may not be so easy as to install all the Linux apps they know and love and have everything look and play nice.

That's I think what gets to people like me. Linux is great for the server and containers, but as far as the desktop goes, it's still trying to figure out what it wants to be all these decades later. The idea that you can make it anything you want is true more in principal than in practice. Luckily, I think I have found my happy place with my customized version of Debian that I'm rolling for my own personal use, but that was after countless hours of trying things until they worked. If I wasn't willing to put in that effort and risk having nothing to show for it, I'd have dismissed Linux as a joke and just used macOS everywhere instead.

I suppose I occasionally notice a tear, but I can't say it's ever affected usability. I'm the type to turn off all animations though, so maybe that has something to do with it. I also use a cheapo $300 4k 32" monitor, and things seem to be fine at 100% scaling with a 10 pt font. If I had a $5000 monitor, I could see wanting to make it work. I also sit a little over 2 ft back from my monitor though, so the angular pixel resolution is still over 60 pixels per degree, so I don't see much point in going higher resolution than 4k.

I have read that HDR support will likely come to Wayland first (if it ever comes to X). That may be a compelling reason to try it out. Hopefully by then some of the kinks are worked out.

Back when I cared more, I was working with a lot of fast motion stuff in software like Maya, Nuke, etc., so the tearing was really bad and distracting.

> I have read that HDR support will likely come to Wayland first (if it ever comes to X). That may be a compelling reason to try it out. Hopefully by then some of the kinks are worked out.

As a side note, it's kinda crazy to me that we're talking about HDR "coming" in 2023; my graphics design teacher was telling us about HDR in 2009.

> But as soon as you try to "make it yours", suddenly you'll find yourself with a second day job with no pay, you'll wonder where all your free time went, and your muscle tone will be gone.

It's true for every OS. I went Windows -> Linux -> MacOS and I had to get used to every time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com