I'm not a Unix grey beard, but I've been using Linux for a while (6 years at this point). I have literally never had a problem that was related to systemd. So all the anti-systemd rhetoric just doesn't seem to have much merit to me.
Gnome is frankly the most polished DE on Linux. I've used many DEs and have run DWM and Sway setups. They all have their pros and cons, but Gnome is fine in my experience. In fact, Gnome is the most the most like a Window Manger of all the DEs. You can pretty easily get a keyboard only setup with Gnome.
I've been on Fedora for the last 2 years and Wayland has also been fine. Stuff like screen sharing was annoying at first, but I can't even remember the last time I noticed I was on wayland.
So call me a Red Hat Shill or whatever, but I just don't see what the hate is all about with systemd/Gnome/Wayland.
Does this mean screen sharing actually works on Wayland? Before I abandoned Manjaro for macOS (mostly because I needed the M1 battery life), it default-switched to Wayland after some updates and I only discovered on a work call that Wayland screensharing was broken. That was early this year.
The details are fuzzy to me now, and my situation may have been odd as I had changed hardware from an Nvidia GPU to an AMD APU, but it was astounding as an end user that that was the state of this "production ready, replace everything under the sun with it" software.
It does work well via the browser. Zoom is a lottery of pain.
1. It consistently breaks closed-cource software that I need to use in education like Mathematica and MATLAB
2. It requires tweaking to work with Flameshot and related screenshotting software
3. It breaks emulation layers like Wine and Proton (or significantly decreases performance). This was a dealbreaker since I managed to move almost completely to Linux for gaming.
4. It does weird things with scaling. I used to use three monitors (two 1080p above one another and a 1060p to the side) and it always did weird things if I tried to span windows across it.
5. It still is not working properly on Nvidia.
There is a problem with these technologies where the leaders are reinventing wheels and making them square in the process, acting like past paradigms are completely useless and that you're ridiculous for even questioning the departure from status quo. And because big entities like Microsoft, Red Hat, Fedora, Canonical etc. spend money on them, the main users have little say in the features developed. Desktop finally got to a reliable and comfortable point with software compatibility and usability, but now we have a ton of people funded by the EmbraceExtendExtinguish crowd pushing a new desktop protocol stack that obviously breaks things.
2) This is because you need to make an API call to the compositor to capture the screen. This is a one-time change unless you're using a very old application that hasn't had Wayland support added in the last decade.
3) It doesn't significantly impact Wine/Proton performance. In fact the Steam Deck runs a Wayland compositor (Gamescope) with the games under XWayland. Valve is porting Wine/Proton to support Wayland natively.
4) This isn't up to Wayland but up to the compositor.
5) This is Nvidia's fault for trying to force everyone else's hand by using their driver API model of choice for years until only recently capitulating.
We dealt with it for years for systemd, but the tides have turned there pretty broadly & 99.999% of us get it and see the value and understand how it's much better than copy pasting shoddy shell scripts around.
Making arguments that people can rebut or support would drastically alter the situation. (Those arguments not all being "Nvidia doesn't work well" would also be required in this case; we of open source are closest to the gods but even us saintly miracle workers on earth have limits & that green devil does confound us.)
Climbing up the ladder from lowest to highest form of disagreement, it would be nice to see folks able to acknowledge perspectives from the other side, to be able to go through what aspects are good & great. Having nuance does not seem to be a strong suit for the anti systemd anti pulseaudio anti Wayland posters. Sometimes there's some of this done, but often pretty backhanded. I'd like to see more steelmanning.
This is why the non-specific griping gets an immediate downvote from me. There are only a few things where the crappiness is so widely agreed upon that you don’t need to explain; if you’re talking about something which millions of computers are already running, it’s quite unlikely that something is completely unusable, or that anything useful will come out of the ranting. If there are specific details, though, it’s possible to have a productive conversation and maybe lead to some open source work.
I confess, I still think The Cathedral and the Bazaar describes a very real distinction in how stuff is developed. One grand pre-designed edifice, versus a lot of different forces in a action slowly sussing out what works well. There's so many people mad sad and angry that everything isn't already perfect. There's people mad sad and angry that everything isn't more centralized, isnt all the same. They see the lack of a core display server as some horrible flaw.
That freedom to try & iterate & explore solution spaces has made things go slower. Sure, yes, and that's had pain. But we've seen so much innovation at the edge, various servers trying different takes & different protocols, and then coming together to try to figure out how to mesh stuff together.
Some people are so averse to these sticky complicated involved processes. It's short term inconvenient to not have a dictator deciding, just picking from off the cuff.
I try to empathize with these views, & I get the yearning for not having to hash stuff out, to some degree. But I don't see any nuance that I'd hope for. I don't see that these harsh unforgiving critics get the stakes, I don't see that they have any appreciation for iteration, I don't see that they have any idea the benefit of this being a social not dictatorial process. They apply their preconceived notions of software as cathedral building to a situation that is shooting for long long long stakes, that wants direly to be long term good after watching many shortly made ad-hoc decisions compound into the X schmorgasboard of ideas.
I feel like these people don't want to be reasoned with. They don't want to consider the Bazaar model. They don't want to respect or love the expansion/contraction of innovation-at-the-edge and then coming together. They by and large don't see that the ability to build a Wayland server out of nothing in a weekend has a decent-if-different counter-position to their angst that one could keep reusing X to build new WM's.
I believe & cherish that we are iterating through Wayland. Protocols are happening. The progress has been clear and nots le, even though various pieces have been harder to settle upon & get right. It's commonly said that the protocol discussions (wars) are resistant to listening to app devs, but in many many threads it's clear there's dueling ideas of what the protocol ought to be, of what works well, but people interpret un-acceptance of their idea as rejection. Things are iterating. Some pieces are harder than others but it seems clear there s iteration. And the village of ideas model that's happening here keeps seeming to make good critical assessments, keeps finding very high quality options, after hard tribulation.
I don't see the nuance from critics: they have specific issues but so often comprehension for the scene, only their own personal bailiwicks. Their criticisms are often the best thing happening, are why this is working, maybe just not at their asked for pace (but instead a build-it-for-life path). They see innovation at the edge as terrible and bad and their enemy, when it is the salvation & protection from mistakes & ability to try things safely that lets us figure stuff out. Critics of systems similarly felt persistently low dimensional, shallow, uninterested & unengaged & uncontemplative. I want nuance and respect, ability to recognize tradeoffs & appreciate the other views, regardless of what one feels, and I find that severely lacking in most HN criticism. And the critics are soooo vocal, so persistent. They exhaust us. While offering little.
It's something else, look what got downvoted/flagged, it's propaganda/censorship at this point ;)
Fortunately I've managed to excise this mess of interconnected dependencies from my computer and run plain X11 with a very functional desktop environment.
No PulseAudio, Systemd, NetworkManager, PipeWire or even D-Bus. And a very low memory footprint and the system is extremely fast, despite it being old hardware.
All of this bloatware is coming out of Freedesktop.org, which is run by Red Hat / GNOME. And it's where most of the toxicity in open source is coming from.
I've also gotten rid of the "modern" user-interface design trends as well. I get a high contrast, high information density desktop with full colour icons. None of this depressing grey garbage we get nowadays. All of the keyboard shortcuts work - I don't even need to use the mouse.
If you showed someone from 20 years ago what a "modern" desktop interface looked like, they would be outraged and in disbelief. We have taken an enormous step back for some reason.
Linux is and has been courting the casual user for quite a while now, which is why I think things are going in this direction. It's a testament to its modularity that it can support the Windows shipjumpers as well as your use cases.
I used Slack for many, many years both as a personal OS and a production server. It's rock solid, fast, and lean. It's not easy though, and you're going to be doing a lot of compiling from source and package management by hand. These are the trade-offs.
The problem is you're not really criticising anything and are just complaining with no real substance. It's just boring whinging.
And I personally dislike systemd, wayland, and gnome, but you don't see me complaining about it every chance I get.