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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Windows NT had many things decades before Linux, I've gotten used to it. There are things Windows has that I still sort of wish Linux had, I mentioned one of them just last night (RDP fast user switching/session roaming.)

If we're just strictly talking about low level things, another good one would be synchronization primitives, which I guess we now have some of in Linux verbatim at this point, if only for the sake of emulation. (And of course futex2.)

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I don't think the kernel prohibits fast user switching but you'd have to implement it at the desktop layer too.

Think of ctrl-alt-f7, f8 etc. This still works today, you can run X servers as different users on different VT numbers and switch between them. All that's missing is better UI.

The kernel definitely doesn't, although the VT layer kind of sucks and probably should've never been used to multiplex graphical sessions. (I mean, I get why it was, but oh well.)

I was talking about this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49093002

And it winds up being mostly a thing you have to implement in the compositor, but none of them do so far to my knowledge.

And of course the same issue applies if you wanted multiple physical seats juggling sessions between them.

That's systemd limitations. Who even uses systemd?

> That's systemd limitations.

It's kind of the opposite, systemd-logind provides better seat management than without. I attempted to implement the same concept using libseat and seatd unsuccessfully though I do not remember exactly what I got caught on. (not in kwin but a toy compositor; I have been at this problem for a little while now.)

That said, most desktop systems have only implemented systemd-logind in a limited way so far that basically just does what the VT system + display manager was already doing, that's what would need to be worked on in order to make this a reality. I was able to accomplish a prototype with only patches to Kwin, kfreerdp and plasma-login-manager, no need to patch systemd-logind or anything like that.

> Who even uses systemd?

Well for one thing, almost all of the major distributions; Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora/RHEL, Arch Linux, NixOS, openSuSE? and of course SteamOS now.

The only major non-systemd Linux distributions I can think of are Alpine Linux and Gentoo. And Android if you wanted to count that, but I think it is special enough to be considered its own OS that just is Linux-based.

Then it's libseat and seatd limitations. Why rely on a system that doesn't do what you want? Bypass it and DIY what you actually want.

I personally use a systemd-based distro (NixOS) and logind is able to handle this use case. The point of trying to support libseat was for the sake of non-systemd distros. (Though elogind would probably work too.)

I certainly wouldn't DIY this; nothing would support my DIY version, which would defeat the purpose.

The Linux platform gives you full control. If the box you seek doesn't exist, you have to create your own box instead of thinking inside someone else's box that doesn't even do what you need.

I'm going to be frank; there is literally no point in replying to me only to not read what I said again. I am running into KDE/GNOME/etc. limitations, not logind. And I both can and have submitted patches to both projects, so I do not need my own box.

Windows strengths: IRPs and fantastic async I/O, ETW events, tooling- windbg xperf driver verifier time travel debugging, RDP, doesn’t claim everything acts like a file

Linux strengths: file system, open source ecosystem, ssh, lockless algorithm support

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