Wayland reduces bugs and standardizes the desktop, and flatpak makes it easier for distros to include apps without going through the process of packaging them.
This post is FUD bullshit, Wayland and Flatpak are making it easier to run an indie distro.
Wayland reduces bugs
As I have to give a few lectures, I can’t say I’m pleased with how screen-sharing or using a projector in the classroom fails almost half of the time and always embarrasses me in front of everyone. I ended up purging the Wayland stuff and going back to good ol’ i3 and I haven’t had a display-related issue ever since.
X11 works, it may not be as sexy or modern as Wayland but it’s battle-tested and just works and for the vast majority of people, excluding Wayland’s bugs, the differences are not even noticeable.
Reduces bugs 🤣
Adding 10 bugs to your apps for every bug removed from the display manager
Wayland is so much better than X. You don’t have to use it but its simplicity means most of the Linux community is going to.
Wayland is not killing smaller distributions. Who even came up with that batshit crazy idea?
Killing is overly dramatic, but it’s putting a burden on certain projects if they want to convert to it and not all have the resources to tank it. I don’t see Window Maker porting their toolkit to Wayland, for instance.
But XWayland exists so I don’t see what’s the fuss.
My comment was about distributions specifically and those package Wayland since ages.
Someone on reddit.
Might as well be someone on lemmy since you reposted it here?
Doesn’t mean I agree with it. It’s still an interesting topic to discuss IMO, hence the repost.
I mean you do agree with it, clearly.
I actually stated in the title I don’t.
Well that’s confusing because the meme is complaint text with Hulk saying that he sees this as an absolute win and you titled the post “I don’t” which means you don’t see this as absolute win and therefore agree with complaint text in the image.
Yes, I don’t see this is as a win at all… what’s your point?
X11 is already dead, and it will not become more or less usable it will always stay the way it’s and wayland will get better. that’s the difference and flatpak is just an option it doesn’t try to replace what’s already availible. spreading distrust and misinformation about these softwares doesn’t help
X11 is already dead
How do you mean that? I’ve been using X11 for like 17 years. i3 uses X11, and I will most likely not use another WM if I can help it. It’s perfect for me. X11 is available in the core repositories of all the big distros.
Curious to know what you mean by “dead”.
Sway is essentially i3 + Wayland, so it shouldn’t be a hard switch once X11 goes EOL.
by dead I mean abandonware, not devoloped for anymore
Just because they don’t do full releases doesn’t mean it isn’t developed anymore. They switched to updating modules individually, with three updates made this month. Doesn’t sound very abandoned to me.
It’s on life support but it is doomed.
People complaining about something opensource not doing what they want it to do: dudes/dudettes, if you want to maintain X11, go right ahead. Or if you want it maintained, pay somebody to do it. But stop this incessant whining about opensource devs choosing a direction you don’t like and pretending it’s the end of the world. This isn’t some faceless, megacorp with closed-source shit you have no control over.
If all the people complaining about wayland either put their energy to positive stuff like making wayland better or making X11 better, this wouldn’t be a problem.
Good thing the world is that simple, you’re completely correct. Nobody who could theoretically prevent something they don’t like is not entitled to their dislike, duh!
That’s exactly what I was I saying! Wow, your reading comprehension gets five stars and a kiss on the check. Papa Wouter must be impressed!
Counterpoint, if all of the people advocating for wayland actually worked on improving wayland to a usable state instead maybe people would actually want to use it.
No one’s forcing you to use it. If you don’t want to, stick to X11. I’ve been testing wayland for a few months now and it’s fine. It does most of I want it to. I don’t need fancy fractional scaling, adaptive refresh rates, or whatever other fancy stuff people complain about that isn’t there. It shows my windows, allows screen-share, and… that’s it. Only thing missing for me is scriptability.
I’m not advocating for Wayland nor X11, just saying to stop shitting on devs who give a lot of free time to write opensource code that none of us have to pay for. All we have to do is be nice - maybe report bugs, maybe maybe donate if we have the means.
Flatpak is good for diversity. Users don’t need to worry about whether the obscure distro they want to use has the software they want in its repos. If a distro supports flatpak it will work with most popular software out of the box.
I may be misunderstanding flatpack, though I do understand the draw of all dependencies in one package.
One of the big things that drew me to linux some years ago was “oh, you don’t have to reinstall every dependency 101 times in a packaged exe so the system stays much smaller?” As well as in-place updates without a restart. It resulted in things being much much less bloated, or maybe that was just placebo.
Linux seems to be going in the flatpack direction which seems to just be turning it into a windows-like system. That and nix-like systems where everything is containerized and restarting is the only thing that applies updates seems to be negating those two big benefits.
Plus, developers can create their own repositories that can then be used on any distro.
Developers are exceptionally bad at packaging software though.
Still better than developers providing .tar.gz files or hosting an apt repo.
Depends, at least with the APT repo there is a chance they used lintian to avoid the worst mistakes.
So having 1 packaging format that works across distros is good.
There are pros and cons.
Total centralization of the Linux Eco system isn’t good for anyone. But total fragmentation where there’s a million different distros that can all do basically the same thing isn’t good either.
Wayland and Flatpak are great projects though. Love seeing them get more adoption.
Great projects, but far from a finished product.
I mean, they’re never gonna be finished if people don’t migrate to them and work on them. A lot of the wayland issues like “wayland breaks X” is because of the devs of said app rather than wayland itself. Kinda like adobe products and Linux, it ain’t linux that’s breaking them.
Yeah this thread is full of people expecting the new thing to immediately surpass the old, ignoring the decades of development and refinement that went into the old solution.
I get that, I really do, but don’t try and push a product that isn’t usable for everyone to everyone. Sure, whoever wants to use it, they can, report bugs, open PRs, whatever, but don’t push this thing like it’s the second comming to everyone out there. One, not everyone needs the features it has, X11 works fine for most people. Two, it’s not backwards compatible, meaning they’d have to abandon a lot of software that just doesn’t work with it (waypipe doesn’t work all the time and with every piece of software there is).
The transition is rushed, everyone feels that. Why? Because a lot of new features that new hardware had couldn’t be implemented in X11. And let’s be honest, this rushing to switch to Wayland is mostly because of gamers. Regarding a lot of things Linux related, they are the de facto standard that dictates whether somethings get’s changed or upgraded. I’m sorry, but not everyone is a gamer. Most people just need a working PC to do whatever. If you can’t be backwards compatible completely with the old UIs, I’m sorry, but that’s a deal breaker for me and I believe most regular users.
Xwayland is a thing, and nobody stops you from installing Xorg if you wanted. They’re just dropping official support so they can focus that energy to Wayland instead.
Also not all Xorg features should be ported.
I have found Wayland will work for 99% of users who aren’t gamers, all the major programs work well, ironically Wayland has been worse for gaming so far for me on the underpowered laptop, but that’s due to it having to run also through xwayland, which will be a problem solved by Valve pretty soon as they don’t have to worry about Xorg anymore and can make proton work better for Wayland.
do you really expect people, who do this work in their free time out of the goodness of their heart, to release fully finished products that are supposed to work 100% flawlessly right from the get-go? maybe FOSS isn’t the right space for you then.
There are projects that beg to differ. PipeWire, a perfect example. The author thought it wasn’t stable enough even though some distros addopted it as default. He switched to version 1.0 a few months ago.
And I do also use non-FOSS software. I use whatever I like, I don’t discriminate, FOSS or not. Sure, it’d be great if every piece of software was open source, but hey, things are what they are 🤷. DaVinci Resolve is closed source, but there are a lot of things NLE video editors can learn from it.
Wayland is still too immature. I couldn’t get it to work on my Kubuntu distro.
And then there’s this list of problems with Wayland.
https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277
BEGIN RANT
“Move fast and break things” may be fine for software gurus who love to experiment and have no problem hitting their head against the wall every few days while believing in the promise of a free-to-fix future, but this isn’t true for poor or busy people who are NOT middle class folks living in their own house in a suburb with a garage full of computer parts. There are single parents, caregivers with disabled and/or elderly, folks who need a reliable computer for their studies, and in general people who simply need something that JUST WORKS.
I’m a caregiver, and unfortunate I’m poor enough that I don’t have money to buy a commercial OS. Heck, I wish Windows just worked instead of making old versions obsolete. I was perfectly fine with Windows 7 ten years ago until Microsoft started doing planned obsolescence bullshit with their forced updates. I had to switch to Linux because Windows became very unreliable and I needed a stable platform that wouldn’t ruin my work.
(So if you’re one of the persons who reply to “Help my Linux is having problems” with “well you should know Linux is like that, you should have thought it twice before switching”, then you’re part of the problem because that’s a very, very shitty answer to give to a non technical end user with limited time and resources)
The year of the Linux desktop will never arrive if developers keep pushing incomplete and buggy software to the end users instead of actually fixing bugs and delivering their stuff ONLY when they’re ready.
Wayland is NOT ready for the end user.
END RANT.
More than enough time to make something that is not as shitty as it still is.
Go on then. Make it better, or make a better one.
Ah yes, end users have no right to point out a software’s flaws unless they’re better than the developers who made it.
Don’t tell me you forgot what a “non technical end user” is?
Users can’t even add a feature request because they’re met with a storm of insults and snobbery.
Well, I have some news for you: You can’t hope for the year of the Linux desktop and keep treating end users like shit.
Pointing out flaws is fine. Shitting on devs, is not, just like devs shitting on users isn’t.
Don’t be surprised if you attack somebody and they defend themselves.
Saying “X doesn’t work” is completely fine. Writing a rant about how opensource devs don’t think about people, yadayada. Buddy, these are people giving up their free time to write stuff. Nobody’s forcing you to use it. There are no guarantees provided, no warranties either. It’s provided as is.
The way you are is as if someone built a free house in the woods, you showed up and complained about how the door is creaky, the toilet leaky, a draft coming through the windows, and you wrote a review online disparaging the free work. Does that sound like good behavior to you?
Users can’t even add a feature request because they’re met with a storm of insults and snobbery.
How did you write the feature request? “I demand this be implemented because you’re providing a product and I’m a customer” or “It would be great if X were added for reason Y”? If it’s the latter and you were met with unkindness, of course that’s shit, no doubt.
I understand devs being busy. What I can’t stand is their fan club who keep shitting on every user asking questions or not having the time to do a deep search on every single solution and the problems that come with it.
Maybe this is news for you, but FOSS communities are incredibly toxic. Every single suggestion or legitimate complaint is taken as a personal attack.
Then they wonder why people don’t pay enough attention to Linux and Open Source Software in general.
Perhaps they should realize there’s too many assholes in the community who keep driving people away. Normal folks have a limit. They just leave and hope their Windows doesn’t crash away, which is less frustrating than having to personally deal not only with tech issues but the shitty attitude of peple who are knowledgeable enough.
Worse, when you want to point out a flaw, you need to build an exhaustive list of reddit posts, archive org pages and so on and face trial because unless you give every single piece of evidence then your complaint is invalid. And I’m sorry but normal people just don’t have time for this shit.
Remember that joke? Ask for help and you get no response; Say linux sucks because you can’t do X and you get dozens of apologetic posts explaining step by step how to do stuff.
Turns out there’s some truth behind that joke.
So there are two points:
- don’t shit on people who donate their free time to make a product you can use for free with no warranty whatsoever, unless they treat you like shit
- many FOSS communities are toxic: I wholeheartedly agree. Fuck those that are. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Still point 2 does not invalidate point 1.
I’ve had to deal with toxic ubuntu, debian, arch, nixos, rust, java, python, … communities. The ones that piss me off the most are linux communities that treat newcomers like gutter-filth, refuse to endorse GUIs, good documentation, and just a generally better newcomer experience, then wonder why there’s no “year of the linux desktop”. I hate those gatekeepers with a passion. “If you use Linux, you must learn to use the command line”, no how about you fuck off to whatever CLI cave you came from and learn to be a productive member of the community?
As I said, I get it. But again, writing an angry bug report, demanding a new feature be implemented, writing a tirade about “how bad opensource software is” or whatever? Nah. Not OK
Remember that joke? Ask for help and you get no response; Say linux sucks because you can’t do X and you get dozens of apologetic posts explaining step by step how to do stuff.
Turns out there’s some truth behind that joke.
Sad but true.
Flatpak doesn’t conform to the XDG home directory, and that upsets me. Also we have an ongoing dispute between SI and IEC units on their GitHub. But I like it otherwise.
The way the flatpak devs responded to the xdg base dir request made me not ever going to use flatpak again, fuck them.
What did they say?
Oh, no, it’s Patrick (tingping). He is very stubborn and doesn’t listen to reason. https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/5504
I really wished that he didn’t participate in the XDG problem, but he did. Then the IEC issue is probably also be screwed in the end.
I didn’t know flatpak was using MB instead of MiB, ever since I moved to linux most apps I’ve used report MiB instead.
Edit: I checked my CLI tools because the guy said that CLI tools are all over the place, the only one that doesn’t use MiB is lf.
Edit2: I lost my shit when I checked the profile of patrick and the first thing in the description says gnome developer, holy shit this can’t be lmao.
Systemd is a mess though. And the Linux kernel. Its a bloated single binary in mostly unsafe languages, which is such an insanity!
I am so happy that Cosmic has such a good Rust compositor and even Desktop using Smithy.
