4 ms·

It really depends on what exactly you're looking for in the "it just works" experience, but since you mention "screen recording" and "external devices" I'll ass

It really depends on what exactly you're looking for in the "it just works" experience, but since you mention "screen recording" and "external devices" I'll assume that you're specifically asking about the modern gamer-streamer (w/ mic, hardware-based sound control, multiple inputs, ViV, etc...) setup and not a basic-browser-and-mail setup. Linux, as in "in the desktop environment", has a HUGE (a can't highlight and stress enough the word HUGE) technical debt. It runs on a graphical server that was designed way before GPUs were even a thing (let alone multi-GPU, variable refresh rate monitors, HDPi, HDR, etc...). And because of all the design limitations, X just can't compete with either Windows nor MacOS (in that specific environment setup that you're asking for). It just can't. Period. Mir and Wayland were born precisely to fix this entire mess. Mir never really took off (because of community backlash?), while Wayland is... well... it has been "in progress" for +10 years and it's still not "there". It will get there, eventually, at which point it might be able to offer the "it just works" experience. Or it might not. We'll have to wait and see. The audio system was already fixed. A few times... We jumped from Jack, OSS and Alsa to PulseAudio and now to PipeWire and things look promising, but PipeWire is also in the progress, so we're not entirely there yet either. Bottom line is: There can't be a distro that "just works", because we're missing the pieces to assemble such a distro.

rvz 5y ago
> Linux, as in "in the desktop environment", has a HUGE (a can't highlight and stress enough the word HUGE) technical debt. Well that is what makes defining official Linux Desktop support something of folklore. You can predictably support and target Windows and macOS users all the time with your app working on those systems for it being all taken care for you. But as for Linux, you will always need to exclude and draw the line somewhere with which distros you want to support. You can't support them all. There will always be that minority of fans of your product, screaming about support for an exotic Linux distro. The developers will just slap UNSUPPORTED and not worth the work. It is because they can foresee a mountain of issues, maintenance debt, hours of issue tracing and costly CIs to maintain just for the claim of which distros are 'officially' supported.
- throwaway82652 5y ago
  That's an area where the community has consistently failed. There's clearly desire among companies to rally behind just one distro (in most cases this is Ubuntu, like it or not) and so if the community was thinking ahead, they would be using that as the standard and aiming for compatibility with it. Instead you get a countless number of distros taking pride in how they're not Ubuntu and they carelessly break Ubuntu software for no reason. In some ways Ubuntu is also part of the problem here by taking actions to make it more difficult for the community to engage.
  - rbreaves 5y ago
    I base my work on Ubuntu Budgie, but I make efforts to support a few popular others for kinto.sh. https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/files/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/files/
    - throwaway82652 5y ago
      Wow, do people actually still use sourceforge? I found it to be really clunky and missing features compared to github or gitlab or something.
      - rbreaves 5y ago
        You don't upload entire 2-5gb iso or vm images to github or gitlab imo. The sorun.me project itself is in fact hosted on github - not sourceforge. Will admit I had no reason to be on sourceforge at all until I was like "Hey.. I need a place to host these images." and I realized that sourceforge is still a thing and perfect for hosting such large images for free. Of course I could host it myself - but I guess I should just provide links on my actual sorun.me page.
        throwaway82652 5y ago
        Oh cool, good to know. I never noticed that before.
kaba0 5y ago
You can’t really claim that Wayland has been in the works for x and x years, when such a hugely critical piece of the ecosystem needs network effect to strive. And I believe wayland has just recently got the critical mass to become the next X, but not getting it sooner is not due to its lack of technical merit.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  The issue is that Wayland isn't a replacement for X. It's become it's own thing entirely, with it's own goals and conflicts with the xorg ideology. On top of that, it doesn't have feature parity with the window server on Windows and certainly doesn't approach the capability of Quartz (and likely never will, judging by it's core values). This puts it in an awkward spot: certain developers are begging users to switch to Wayland despite the fact that it only works with two and a half DEs, while other developers are pledging to never transition their software in the first place. Wayland's own development is constantly taking forwards and backwards steps in ways that are scaring users (like myself) away from using it. This is the part where I'd usually give credit to the developers for not turning it into a GNOME-first utility, but even that's untrue as the only "complete" implementation is Mutter. At this point I've conceded that I will use x11 until I die. I will write software for x11 until I stop writing software. Yes, it is miserable, but it's never failed me and there has never been any "politics" ruining it. There's no wlroots to fuck around with to get certain basic features working. There's no xWayland to scream at when my software doesn't "just work". The whole thing is so disappointingly ironic that I can't help but ignore it's development.
  - throwaway82652 5y ago
    You will be miserable and waiting forever because what you want is impossible for all practical purposes. Feature parity is a red herring when some newer features just can't be done properly on X. The "xorg ideology" is to basically not have security on anything and to consider GPUs to be an afterthought, as stated by a parent comment. From a user perspective, this situation is untenable and yet will never actually improve because doing so would break the protocol and all the clients. I've spoken to some of the other DE developers and pretty much all of them have said to me the only reason they don't want to move away from X is because they lack the manpower to do it. Also, the reason there's no "politics" anymore is because most of the developers have moved on to Wayland. There were quite a few flame wars on the X mailing lists back in the day. You can probably blame some of that for the existence of Wayland, which should actually have less politics because multiple groups are no longer fighting for what to put in the one centralized X server. The one area where there was activity, and arguments were popping up again was... you guessed it, Xwayland, but they solved that by bring it into its own release cycle away from the rest.

rvz 5y ago

> Linux, as in "in the desktop environment", has a HUGE (a can't highlight and stress enough the word HUGE) technical debt. Well that is what makes defining official Linux Desktop support something of folklore. You can predictably support and target Windows and macOS users all the time with your app working on those systems for it being all taken care for you. But as for Linux, you will always need to exclude and draw the line somewhere with which distros you want to support. You can't support them all. There will always be that minority of fans of your product, screaming about support for an exotic Linux distro. The developers will just slap UNSUPPORTED and not worth the work. It is because they can foresee a mountain of issues, maintenance debt, hours of issue tracing and costly CIs to maintain just for the claim of which distros are 'officially' supported.

throwaway82652 5y ago
That's an area where the community has consistently failed. There's clearly desire among companies to rally behind just one distro (in most cases this is Ubuntu, like it or not) and so if the community was thinking ahead, they would be using that as the standard and aiming for compatibility with it. Instead you get a countless number of distros taking pride in how they're not Ubuntu and they carelessly break Ubuntu software for no reason. In some ways Ubuntu is also part of the problem here by taking actions to make it more difficult for the community to engage.
- rbreaves 5y ago
  I base my work on Ubuntu Budgie, but I make efforts to support a few popular others for kinto.sh. https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/files/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/files/
  - throwaway82652 5y ago
    Wow, do people actually still use sourceforge? I found it to be really clunky and missing features compared to github or gitlab or something.
    - rbreaves 5y ago
      You don't upload entire 2-5gb iso or vm images to github or gitlab imo. The sorun.me project itself is in fact hosted on github - not sourceforge. Will admit I had no reason to be on sourceforge at all until I was like "Hey.. I need a place to host these images." and I realized that sourceforge is still a thing and perfect for hosting such large images for free. Of course I could host it myself - but I guess I should just provide links on my actual sorun.me page.
      - throwaway82652 5y ago
        Oh cool, good to know. I never noticed that before.

kaba0 5y ago

You can’t really claim that Wayland has been in the works for x and x years, when such a hugely critical piece of the ecosystem needs network effect to strive. And I believe wayland has just recently got the critical mass to become the next X, but not getting it sooner is not due to its lack of technical merit.

smoldesu 5y ago
The issue is that Wayland isn't a replacement for X. It's become it's own thing entirely, with it's own goals and conflicts with the xorg ideology. On top of that, it doesn't have feature parity with the window server on Windows and certainly doesn't approach the capability of Quartz (and likely never will, judging by it's core values). This puts it in an awkward spot: certain developers are begging users to switch to Wayland despite the fact that it only works with two and a half DEs, while other developers are pledging to never transition their software in the first place. Wayland's own development is constantly taking forwards and backwards steps in ways that are scaring users (like myself) away from using it. This is the part where I'd usually give credit to the developers for not turning it into a GNOME-first utility, but even that's untrue as the only "complete" implementation is Mutter. At this point I've conceded that I will use x11 until I die. I will write software for x11 until I stop writing software. Yes, it is miserable, but it's never failed me and there has never been any "politics" ruining it. There's no wlroots to fuck around with to get certain basic features working. There's no xWayland to scream at when my software doesn't "just work". The whole thing is so disappointingly ironic that I can't help but ignore it's development.
- throwaway82652 5y ago
  You will be miserable and waiting forever because what you want is impossible for all practical purposes. Feature parity is a red herring when some newer features just can't be done properly on X. The "xorg ideology" is to basically not have security on anything and to consider GPUs to be an afterthought, as stated by a parent comment. From a user perspective, this situation is untenable and yet will never actually improve because doing so would break the protocol and all the clients. I've spoken to some of the other DE developers and pretty much all of them have said to me the only reason they don't want to move away from X is because they lack the manpower to do it. Also, the reason there's no "politics" anymore is because most of the developers have moved on to Wayland. There were quite a few flame wars on the X mailing lists back in the day. You can probably blame some of that for the existence of Wayland, which should actually have less politics because multiple groups are no longer fighting for what to put in the one centralized X server. The one area where there was activity, and arguments were popping up again was... you guessed it, Xwayland, but they solved that by bring it into its own release cycle away from the rest.