If I had to use a Desktop environment in Linux, it would be XFCE.
But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I have no abandoned Linux and I doubt Wayland will become mandatory until Firefox stops supporting X.
But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I have no abandoned Linux and I doubt Wayland will become mandatory until Firefox stops supporting X.
I'm quite disillusioned with desktop computing in general. Microsoft and Google are leading the way with "enshittification" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and the Mac experience in 2024 isn't like what it was in 2009 when the Mac was at its peak, in my opinion. The Linux desktop ecosystem suffers from a lack of funding relative to its commercial peers, combined with the "organization from chaos" that comes with bazaar-style development. The X11 to Wayland transition would be easier to pull off if the Linux desktop has Microsoft- or Apple-levels of funding and cooperation, but such funding doesn't exist, and part of the characteristic of the bazaar is that developers and teams of developers get to work on projects of their own interest and its the community that "votes" on projects by using them. The bazaar definitely exhibits freedom, but the major downside is that major changes in infrastructure (such as the X11 to Wayland transition) could take a lot of time and have major pain points (for example, the development of incompatible Wayland compositors and the fact that the X11 concept of a window manager doesn't exactly translate to Wayland's concepts).
I love free, open source software, but I'm drawn more to cathedral-style projects such as the BSDs and HaikuOS where there is a coherent vision for the system. Unfortunately the BSDs are dependent on the broader FOSS ecosystem for desktops, which is dominated by the GNOME/KDE/Wayland ecosystem (which also priorities Linux and treats other Unix-like operating systems as an afterthought, but that's another discussion). I'll need to re-investigate HaikuOS to see whether it can be used as a daily driver today; I've seen that a lot of attention has been given to HaikuOS in recent years.
I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the Newton, which involved a Lisp OS (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). But I have a busy day job and so this will take years of effort on the side.
I, much as other users, just want my computer to solve the problems I ask of it, not turn into an activity in its own right or a maze of hosting problems and pain to get a simple task done. The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that.
macOS is my dream OS as it stands.
I can add a cucumber to my shopping list on my mac and when I get to the supermarket, it's on my phone.
I can share a calendar with my family and it just works.
I can listen to music on it and the same music is on my phone.
I can open and move pages around in a PDF without having to futz with anything or open a terminal.
I can literally write on my iPad with a pen and a PDF pops out full of my writing which I can send to people for review and feedback.
I can use Lightroom, Photoshop and Excel, which are far superior to any open source products and I do not mind paying for that privilege.
etc etc.
The hardware cost and upgrade inflexibility, neither of which I have found a problem either way, is insignificant anyway to the pain I would incur without it.
And that's what the community does't get: the last 20% is the hard bit and the above is the last 20% and it has never even once in the history of OSS got anywhere even remotely near that. No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it.
No one cares, until they do. Everything you mentioned depends on a single company, which follows the commands from just a few people, who can one day decide to lead the operating system in a direction which makes it no longer your "dream OS", and intellectual property law makes it so that no other company can undo their changes.
> The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that.
We haven't, and that's why we prefer operating systems we fully control, instead of being bound by the whims of some foreign megacorporation, enforced by intellectual property law.
While you might have the illusion of control, the exit plan to take control is to take on tens of millions of lines of source code and manage it yourself. That is not control.
Your data is the important bit. If you keep that portable and/or recreatable then it doesn't matter what tools you use.
Well now you're just contradicting yourself. I'm not going to say RedHat and fd.o have been perfect all the time or have always made the best decisions or haven't pursued agendas that may have been at odds with others.
But c'mon. On one side you're saying that open source can never be good because no one maintains the cohesiveness and attention span to do "the last 20%", but then you rail on organizations that have tried to set and maintain standards, and reduce fragmentation on the desktop?
You can't have it both ways.
I think a lot of people in OSS do get that, but in many ways it's significantly harder to do that last 20% in an open source project than it is for a proprietary software company to do it.
But ultimately I don't care that much, honestly. If you don't get what you need out of open source, that's fine. You not using it isn't a problem for me or for my own open source work. As long as there are enough users to keep communities going and developers interested, that's all that matters.
> and the above is the last 20% and it has never even once in the history of OSS got anywhere even remotely near that.
That's provably false, and it's pretty annoying when people make uninformed absolutist statements like that.
> No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it.
A lot of people do. No, not a majority, and maybe not even a largely sizeable minority, but it's very very far from "no one". If you don't, I guess that's fine. I hope your proprietary software continues to do what you need and want, and that your needs and interests continue to be aligned with what those software companies want to give you. That hasn't been true for me for a very long time now, but certainly people have different needs and different thresholds for it to matter. But if that changes, feel fortunate that all the work we've done will still be available for you to take advantage of.
> The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that.
Your use of the word "slavery" is a bit bizarre and overwrought, but it's funny you say something like this. Open source software is the only kind of software that's going to respect your freedom. Proprietary software never will. You're at the whims of its makers, and can never take control of your own computing destiny.
Like the sibling said, I guess that doesn't matter to you now. But maybe it will, someday, when the game changes yet again.
> And at least in my case that is 100% portable
For now. Time and time again I see stories where people think they have redundant copies of everything important, and can reconstruct things when a company pulls out the rug out from under them, only to find they're missing something important.
Maybe you aren't. Great, good for you. You represent a teeny tiny percentage of the sum of proprietary software users. Again, I'm glad you believe you're safe and happy with the arrangement you have, but you're uncommon, and that's the entire point.
And for me, it's not just portability. Most companies are going to mine your data, use it to train AI, sell it to third parties, whatever they think will make them money. Or they just get hacked, like everyone does, eventually. You can protect yourself from that with open source. Not saying you don't still have to be vigilant, of course you do... but with proprietary software? Well, best of luck with that. Even with Apple, one of the few companies I think are reasonably trustworthy stewards of customer data, despite all the other issues I have with that company.
Btw the lenses still are yellowish, and interfere with white balance. Attempt to correct the white balance will destroy the effect of the lenses at 450 nm will be back.
Cool, I'll be following that. To me, one of the most interesting aspects of Genera is the command line interface, where commands know their arguments' names, types, defaults, and help strings. The commands can output nicely formatted data such as tables and, because they're just Lisp functions, they can share structured data directly rather than parsing and serializing ad-hoc text formats as is that's typical in the Unix world.
I wholeheartedly agree with you; a system based on structured data or objects would be much better than what we have today. What I've been dreaming about for years is a system where everything is an object, much like Smalltalk. Instead of typing "ls" in a terminal window, you would send a get_files request to the current directory, which would return a list of file names. It's possible to emulate the traditional Unix "ls" command, but interacting programmatically with the system enables so many other uses that's much easier than parsing text or calling POSIX system calls. Because the user is working with objects instead of text, not only would it be easier to write scripts compared to Unix shell scripts, it would also be easier for developers to implement GUI tools for the system. For example, imagine if word processing documents were represented by a class that handled all sorts of manipulations of the document, hiding the details of the underlying file format from the user and developer in most cases. It would be easier to come up with scripts for generating and modifying word processing documents without having to use the word processor's macros (if they're available in the first place) or without having to dive deep into the underlying file formats of the documents.
[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/symbolics/software/genera_8/Pro...
Soldered RAM is faster than socketed RAM. What's faster still is Apple's current approach: putting the RAM inside the CPU chip package. This is one of the reasons why Apple Silicon chips are so screamingly fast and handily beat any x86 chip core-for-core.
> to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS)
These help prevent malicious software, such as downloaded apps or even web pages, from exfiltrating or tampering with user data. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1200/
IMO, we're heading for "X11 over Wayland" desktops, in which the only X11 implementation is Xwayland. These expensive applications which target X11 will keep working, through that compatibility layer.
Those that are written to use Xlib directly, sure, they'll take some work (though rewritten? doubtful). If their maintainers don't want to do that, they'll still run under Xwayland.
It is not even about the access (people usually use nx or even vnc for that). It is about having a system that can work as a part of a cluster (network filesystem, X11), with all base GUI utilities (terminals, file managers, browsers, pdf viewers) supporting that.
It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on) and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland.
The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck and always was. Its just that for a long time people invest in it and made it usable. The same is true for Wayland, things have been improving rapidly in Wayland and it many ways its already better.
The train wreck is being cleared and the trains are running again, literally nobody will go back to horses.
What is there in Wayland is really quite clean though, so it will... EVENTUALLY... be pretty good.
In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
XFCE, Lxqt, Mate all have at least partial wayland support.
Cinnamon has experimental support.
So for now it happens to work. But none of those DEs are contributing to the X.org implementation of X11, right? So it will slowly break down over time. That's the current status of X11, it's on hospice.
The current status of Wayland is that it doesn't.
It's really that simple. I think this exchange can help you understand my position better: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201...
>Wayland has a myriad of unresolved problems regarding surface suspension blocking presentation and the FIFO (vsync) implementation being fundamentally broken leading to reduced GPU-bound performance.
To which someone replies:
>If we do this, we are basically accepting these issues are unfixable for the next ten years (SDL4). Having this as the default in SDL3 (which isn't being used yet!) is important for signaling to other stakeholders that we actually do need to get solutions in place for detected issues.
To which the committer says:
>SDL is not your tool for "signaling to stakeholders" about what is important. It's an actual library used by real developers and users!
Likewise. My PC is not a tool for signaling library/DE developers that there are more and more people using Wayland now and that they can finally stop maintaining X11 legacy code. I use my PC for real things. I couldn't care less if things are running on X11 or Wayland so long as they work.
If Wayland isn't working with my use case, I just won't use it. I won't switch to Wayland juts to beta test it, and then spend years begging people who know how to hack Linux to implement the features I need that I had on X11.
If Linux drops X11, and Wayland still doesn't work. I won't use Wayland. I'll use Windows.
They already have, this is what I'm trying to tell you. All the X.org maintainers are on Wayland, and none of the DEs are contributed to X.org. It's on hospice. It happens to work just because, but that won't be the case forever.
It's fine if you currently like X and use X. I myself use X on Debian Stable.
But the reality is that it's dead technology, and eventually it won't work right.
Wayland is constantly being improved by many, many different parties. Valve, KDE, Gnome, freedesktop, Redhat... they're all constantly making new protocols and implementing them to solve problems.
GIMP supports PNG. That doesn't mean GIMP contributes code to libpng, or libpng needs updates. It just needs to have code to make it work with PNG.
X11 will stop being supported when the developers literally remove the code to make their programs run on X11 from their projects. Until then, it's still supported.
Why would I need updates when things already work in the current version?
> Why would I need updates when things already work in the current version?
I guess you don't, but then again, I don't see you running Windows 95. I think this is maybe something you like to believe, but in practice people do want new things and new software.
For most of those years, fundamental parts of the desktop experience were just not possible on Wayland. Even today, there are some current Xfce features that are just not implementable on Wayland.
> You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
Depends on your goals and team size. Part of me would love to rewrite Xfce in Rust (yes, I'm one of those people), using a different, lighter, actually-well supported toolkit (unlike GTK3), but with the team we have, that would be another two decades.
Consider that Xfce 4 is a little over 20 years old at this point. It's taken that long to build it to what it is. Starting over wouldn't take any less time to get there with the people and resources we have.
What features are missing from Xfce perspective?
"Unsupported" as in there are no maintainers, there's no roadmap, there's no future. X11 is a dead end. All the people who were working on it would rather work on Wayland instead. It's taking a while for the DEs, etc. to catch up, but even the slow pace of improvement Wayland is exhibiting is much better than "dead in the water" which is where X11 is.
Unsupported in the context of software doesn't really mean what you took it as anyway.
I haven’t figured out the magic dbus (I guess) incantations required to make screen sharing work without systemd though. I guess it needs pipewire at least.
I don't think Wayland should add a print server ;)