6 ms·

Wayland was the last straw for me. It made me switch to Macs after 20 years of almost exclusive Linux on the desktop and a few dev stints. It was cool when my t

Wayland was the last straw for me. It made me switch to Macs after 20 years of almost exclusive Linux on the desktop and a few dev stints. It was cool when my time was less expensive. I check the state of the linux world about once a year still. And obviously keep using it on the servers. Best of luck to everyone using it for desktop. I totally get why you do it, but it's just not for me right now.

gtirloni 6y ago
Nobody is forcing you to use Wayland. Or are they? On Fedora it's a single line change em /etc to disable it (which I do because of Nvidia).
- grandinj 6y ago
  Except that, in the name of progress, various things are broken in the x11 world too on fedora, as a direct consequence of the wayland updates. Which is unfortunate
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    Sounds like a Fedora problem then. Pick a different distro - problem solved. There is nothing so special going on in Fedora that can’t be done in other distros. Try an Arch based Linux desktop. You’ll get newer packages and better package management. Manjaro has worked well for me.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    Fedora switched to Wayland, that is unfortunate for X.Org users but basically it means someone stopped fixing issues. You either fix them yourself and contribute back if possible. Or switch to distribution where someone still fixes these issues. I've investigated X.Org caused bug just for two days and since then totally support Wayland development. What we have today is not healthy.
    - grandinj 6y ago
      We used to have a well-functioning display server that was robust and battle-tested. The wayland people replaced that with a half-baked solution because they insisted on boiling the ocean - replacing the entire thing in one go, instead of working piecemeal (which the X protocol was explicitly designed to allow). Which is a great pity, because now the day of the Linux Desktop is even further off.
      - sergeykish 6y ago
        X.Org people replaced it with Wayland. Are you going to maintain X.Org? Who is going to maintain it? Maybe you are going to hire developers to preserve purity? > instead of working piecemeal That's exactly what happened. Do you remember fonts without anti-aliasing? Run xfontsel, that's X11 fonts rendering. Freetype, Fontconfig, Cairo, Pango, HarfBuzz work on client side and push pixels to X Server. Entire rendering model changed, X.Org become compositor. They've faced limits, they've implemented DRI, DRI2 [1]. Now developers decided to make good compositor. And they've done it without disturbing X11 ecosystem, with clean way to port toolkits. Window Managers can't be ported but they can be reimplemented, just look how many compositors people built [2]. It is a miracle. Linux future is bright. Video drivers moved from X Server to kernel, display configuration parts replaced by KMS, we've got modern font rendering, text shaping, we've got open source AMD GPU driver! I still use Intel GPU, X.Org and xmonad, but the times they are a changing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Infrastructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Infrastructur... [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland
        nullc 6y ago
        > Do you remember fonts without anti-aliasing? On a 200 dpi display the xfontsel display looks better. :)
        sergeykish 6y ago
        I believe you can disable anti aliasing and font hinting in Fontconfig.
- darthrupert 6y ago
  Indeed. And thankfully nobody is forcing me to use Linux.
- jhasse 6y ago
  btw: Fedora automatically disables Wayland on Nvidia hardware (because Xwayland applications can't be accelerated IIRC).
sergeykish 6y ago
But why? X11 works. I've tried wayland in 2010, second time today. If anything today's story shows that developers do not want to work on X11 and how much we depend on Red Hat. X11 problems explained by Daniel Stone [1]. As I understand there are two parallel architectures, one uses X11 server primitives (xfontsel), another renders on client (fontconfig fc-list etc). It is very confusing. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
grep_name 6y ago
Have you considered using a tiling window manager? I've been using bspwm for years and it just uses X. I don't really miss anything about floating window managers, and since switching everything feels more stable and portable
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  I'm using a tiling window manager on Mac
  - na85 6y ago
    Which one?
    - eatonphil 6y ago
      Not who you're responding to; there's Amethyst but I use Rectangle (the fork of now defunct Spectacles).
    - least 6y ago
      Perhaps Amethyst[1] or yabai[2]. You can also write your own with Hammerspoon[3]. [1] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst [2] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [3] https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        Yabai is the one I was using.
bashtoni 6y ago
I was provided with a Macbook Pro 15" by my work and I struggle to understand comments like this. Upgrades often break things, I'm forced to use brew to install software which leaves files strewn around the file system and regularly seems to have cross package conflicts. And don't get me started on the hardware - the laptop is excessively heavy and the keyboard is awful (and I don't just mean the touch bar gimmick). My personal laptop is a Lenovo Carbon X1 and Fedora runs very nicely on it, requiring very little thought put into management if you're running the default desktop (Gnome). I can update the firmware and BIOS from inside Linux, and Lenovo have even started shipping newer versions of the laptop with Fedora pre-installed. There's massive scope of tinkering with Linux if you want to, but as long as you're careful with the hardware you buy there's absolutely no need to tinker at all if you don't want to.
- javagram 6y ago
  Macports seems much better than brew generally, but also under maintained and vastly under-used compared to brew for some reason.
- darthrupert 6y ago
  That's fine, there's no reason why everyone needs to understand why I do what I do :) I agree with you on FOSS software brittleness though, Linux is usually better on that front. Brew is a hack that works well enough in practice, however.

gtirloni 6y ago

Nobody is forcing you to use Wayland. Or are they? On Fedora it's a single line change em /etc to disable it (which I do because of Nvidia).

grandinj 6y ago
Except that, in the name of progress, various things are broken in the x11 world too on fedora, as a direct consequence of the wayland updates. Which is unfortunate
- wayneftw 6y ago
  Sounds like a Fedora problem then. Pick a different distro - problem solved. There is nothing so special going on in Fedora that can’t be done in other distros. Try an Arch based Linux desktop. You’ll get newer packages and better package management. Manjaro has worked well for me.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Fedora switched to Wayland, that is unfortunate for X.Org users but basically it means someone stopped fixing issues. You either fix them yourself and contribute back if possible. Or switch to distribution where someone still fixes these issues. I've investigated X.Org caused bug just for two days and since then totally support Wayland development. What we have today is not healthy.
  - grandinj 6y ago
    We used to have a well-functioning display server that was robust and battle-tested. The wayland people replaced that with a half-baked solution because they insisted on boiling the ocean - replacing the entire thing in one go, instead of working piecemeal (which the X protocol was explicitly designed to allow). Which is a great pity, because now the day of the Linux Desktop is even further off.
    - sergeykish 6y ago
      X.Org people replaced it with Wayland. Are you going to maintain X.Org? Who is going to maintain it? Maybe you are going to hire developers to preserve purity? > instead of working piecemeal That's exactly what happened. Do you remember fonts without anti-aliasing? Run xfontsel, that's X11 fonts rendering. Freetype, Fontconfig, Cairo, Pango, HarfBuzz work on client side and push pixels to X Server. Entire rendering model changed, X.Org become compositor. They've faced limits, they've implemented DRI, DRI2 [1]. Now developers decided to make good compositor. And they've done it without disturbing X11 ecosystem, with clean way to port toolkits. Window Managers can't be ported but they can be reimplemented, just look how many compositors people built [2]. It is a miracle. Linux future is bright. Video drivers moved from X Server to kernel, display configuration parts replaced by KMS, we've got modern font rendering, text shaping, we've got open source AMD GPU driver! I still use Intel GPU, X.Org and xmonad, but the times they are a changing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Infrastructure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Infrastructur... [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland
      - nullc 6y ago
        > Do you remember fonts without anti-aliasing? On a 200 dpi display the xfontsel display looks better. :)
        sergeykish 6y ago
        I believe you can disable anti aliasing and font hinting in Fontconfig.
darthrupert 6y ago
Indeed. And thankfully nobody is forcing me to use Linux.
jhasse 6y ago
btw: Fedora automatically disables Wayland on Nvidia hardware (because Xwayland applications can't be accelerated IIRC).

sergeykish 6y ago

But why? X11 works. I've tried wayland in 2010, second time today. If anything today's story shows that developers do not want to work on X11 and how much we depend on Red Hat. X11 problems explained by Daniel Stone [1]. As I understand there are two parallel architectures, one uses X11 server primitives (xfontsel), another renders on client (fontconfig fc-list etc). It is very confusing. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ

grep_name 6y ago

Have you considered using a tiling window manager? I've been using bspwm for years and it just uses X. I don't really miss anything about floating window managers, and since switching everything feels more stable and portable

whimsicalism 6y ago
I'm using a tiling window manager on Mac
- na85 6y ago
  Which one?
  - eatonphil 6y ago
    Not who you're responding to; there's Amethyst but I use Rectangle (the fork of now defunct Spectacles).
  - least 6y ago
    Perhaps Amethyst[1] or yabai[2]. You can also write your own with Hammerspoon[3]. [1] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst [2] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai [3] https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      Yabai is the one I was using.

bashtoni 6y ago

I was provided with a Macbook Pro 15" by my work and I struggle to understand comments like this. Upgrades often break things, I'm forced to use brew to install software which leaves files strewn around the file system and regularly seems to have cross package conflicts. And don't get me started on the hardware - the laptop is excessively heavy and the keyboard is awful (and I don't just mean the touch bar gimmick). My personal laptop is a Lenovo Carbon X1 and Fedora runs very nicely on it, requiring very little thought put into management if you're running the default desktop (Gnome). I can update the firmware and BIOS from inside Linux, and Lenovo have even started shipping newer versions of the laptop with Fedora pre-installed. There's massive scope of tinkering with Linux if you want to, but as long as you're careful with the hardware you buy there's absolutely no need to tinker at all if you don't want to.

javagram 6y ago
Macports seems much better than brew generally, but also under maintained and vastly under-used compared to brew for some reason.
darthrupert 6y ago
That's fine, there's no reason why everyone needs to understand why I do what I do :) I agree with you on FOSS software brittleness though, Linux is usually better on that front. Brew is a hack that works well enough in practice, however.