5 ms·

My strategy is to keep the software for a desktop computer stable and of it's era forever. If it gets so old that I'm having trouble compiling things because my

My strategy is to keep the software for a desktop computer stable and of it's era forever. If it gets so old that I'm having trouble compiling things because my glib and gcc are so old then I'll build an entirely new desktop with up to date OS and software. Then set it up and use it till it can't do new software again. This happens every 5 to 10 years. I never lose ability. I only gain it. There are many things my 2010 era Core2Duo running Ubuntu 10.04 can do that my fancy new Ryzen desktop with Debian 11 can't and won't ever be able to do. Things I cannot give up because they're too important for my daily life. >And when Wayland finally happens? Well. I guess I’ll have no choice but to stop using computers forever ¯\_(ツ)_/ Wayland isn't going to happen. https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-x...

cowtools 4y ago
Wayland doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to an improvement over Xorg, which is hampered by its complexity and reverse compatibility.
- uecker 4y ago
  I do not think the criticism of Xorg is really correct. At its core, it is actually a nice and well-designed protocol. It is also rock-solid, works without any problem in all my configurations, and supports remote desktop.
- lmm 4y ago
  > Wayland doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to an improvement over Xorg Agreed, but it shows no signs of ever achieving that. Yes, it has mixed DPI support, which is not nothing, but that doesn't generally make up for the areas where it doesn't have parity with Xorg and never intends to reach that parity. (Network transparency, screen recording, ...) > which is hampered by its complexity and reverse compatibility Users don't care about technical elegance. If and when those things start causing user-visible issues with Xorg then Wayland might get a chance.
MarioMan 4y ago
>There are many things my 2010 era Core2Duo running Ubuntu 10.04 can do that my fancy new Ryzen desktop with Debian 11 can't and won't ever be able to do. Things I cannot give up because they're too important for my daily life. This has me curious: What sorts of tasks are you doing that only work on a machine like this? I love finding new things to do with old hardware, so I'm interested in your insights.
- youngNed 4y ago
  i'm going to guess its a Thinkpad, x200? t410? maybe even an x61. People (myself included) still use those, not because they do anything more in particular, but they feel great to use, nicely weighted and a stunning[1] keyboard [1]ymmv, but personally the keyboard on an x61 is perfection, the screen however is very very very far from perfection
  - digitallyfree 4y ago
    If it's the feeling of the hardware alone then the Thinkpad could be used as a thin client to access a modern, more powerful system. Personally I'm curious about the "many things" the C2D with Ubuntu 10 can do that the new one can't - is it some legacy software that can't run on a newer os, or something else?
  - chi42 4y ago
    Man I loved my x61. It was like the duracell bunny. It was in my apartment in 2011 when the building burned down. The roof collapsed on it and the only thing I had to fix was the screen backlight. I used that laptop until 2020.
dsr_ 4y ago
Have you considered pulling your Ubuntu desktop into a VM running on the Ryzen? Let it transcend the mortal shell in which it was born.
- robotresearcher 4y ago
  Your now-immortal VM could run faster while using less power, even with the virtualization overhead.
ntoskrnl 4y ago
Most of the bigger distros have already switched to wayland. It's pretty much inevitable that the rest follow eventually. https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2021/10/distros-which-adopted-wayland-in-2021.html https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2021/10/distros-which-adopted-way...
- w4rh4wk5 4y ago
  Well, most distros also ship X and allow you to choose at login. I'd imagine quite a lot of people are still running X since there's always something that does not play nice with Wayland. My favorite: drag-and-drop from file-roller into nautilus. [1] [1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4
  - corrral 4y ago
    Drag & Drop is an action I had to consciously work to start using when I switched to macOS, a little over a decade ago. Windows and Linux had trained me never to use it, aside from moving files around in Explorer or whatever, because it so often caused crashes, did the wrong thing, or made programs glitch out in weird ways (that last one was mostly Linux). Sure enough, I found a repeatable drag & drop application crash in KDE in my first few minutes of use, last time I poked my head into the desktop Linux world (Ubuntu, in this case) again, a couple years back.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      How did Windows train you not to use drag and drop? It's never not worked. Same with OSX. Yet Linux you have to live without it, asking questions on reddit or discord/irc results in 'use the command line to move the file'... which is a bit absurd.
      - krinkaow 4y ago
        An example: Drag&Drop from 7-zip or winrar causes an extraction to a temporary folder, then copied from there making it take much longer than doing "extract to folder" directly.
horsawlarway 4y ago
lawl - wayland has already happened. Also, and more seriously - I think I'm not going to take you at your word on this one: There are many things my 2010 era Core2Duo running Ubuntu 10.04 can do that my fancy new Ryzen desktop with Debian 11 can't and won't ever be able to do. Things I cannot give up because they're too important for my daily life. I'd love to see a real example instead of this pithy line. My strong (STRONG) suspicion is that anything you can do on that old machine can be done on the new one just fine - although you might have to adjust a bit or learn a new tool, and that can be painful and annoying.
- akagusu 4y ago
  Wayland is at best a work in progress. And if you consider that they made Wayland default on GNOME to force adoption and users usually go to Internet seeking for advice on how to switch back to X11 on GNOME, we will probably wait a long time for Wayland happen.
  - christophilus 4y ago
    I’ve been using it happily for over a year with no real issues. But I do share your concern. I like the variety and choice of WMs on Linux and the Gnome / Wayland crowd do seem to add friction to the other contenders.
    - akagusu 4y ago
      > I like the variety and choice of WMs on Linux and the Gnome / Wayland crowd do seem to add friction to the other contenders. This is a big problem because this friction they add on purpose hurts users of other wm/desktops that don't get their preferred wm/de working correctly. And it also hurts other open-source developers because it seems the only ones doing something right are the Gnome devs, when in fact the others devs are having problems only because Gnome devs.
      - prmoustache 4y ago
        The Gnome dev do not force anyone on anything, especially regarding parts of the linux desktop they don't develop themselves. This is just conspiracy theory.
hyperion2010 4y ago
I love the point in there that it isn't actually xorg vs wayland, it is xorg vs dbus. Wayland is so deficient that basically everything has to depend on dbus if it doesn't want to use X. This framing clarifies the issue substantially, because whatever people think about wayland, they might have some slightly different opinions about dbus.
- rrix2 4y ago
  > slightly different opinions about dbus Recently i updated my machine and it would fail to boot because NetworkManager-wait-online.service's invocation of `nm-online -s` would fail even when NM was connected, even when `nm-online` actual liveness check would succeed. I spent hours reading NM code, wading through auto-generated GObject introspections and their XML bullshit to try to figure out why org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.startup was true, what the magic numbers in org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Connection.Active.StateFlags meant, why my desktop wouldn't boot and couldn't even find what could could cause the state to change before I finally gave up and patched nm-wait-online to just invoke the codepath which did an actual liveness check rather than bumble through a bunch of dbus interfaces. Gotta say I was missing the old KDE3 dcop after that... IPC is still such a PITA on linux.
stinkytaco 4y ago
> Wayland isn't going to happen. I'd be very disappointed by this because I'm in a mixed DPI environment and I need its support. Seriously though, I find hostility toward Wayland so weird. I could kind of understand it with systemd, but X seems perpetually stuck in 2005.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > Seriously though, I find hostility toward Wayland so weird. I think the hostility towards Wayland is pretty justified. It's a backdoor power-grab by the GNOME foundation and Red Hat, much like Flatpak, Libadwaita, and to a limited extent, systemd. I, like many others, am totally exhausted of GNOME trying to be the center of the desktop universe. Every couple years, they decide to redouble their development efforts on some useless, stopgap tool that ultimately ends up being underdeveloped and redundant. Making matters worse, they announce $PROGRAM to be the next big feature of Linux, and anyone who's refusing to embrace it is a luddite. In reality, most people can't switch to these alternatives because they're niche, and don't provide the same degree of functionality as their favorite Window Manager. Furthermore, people don't hate the idea of something replacing X, people hate the fact that Wayland has been in development for more than a decade and is still considerably worse than Xorg with objectively less features and functionality. Adding insult to injury, a majority of these omissions are deliberately removed by the maintainers because the GNOME desktop doesn't need it, therefore everyone else doesn't. Take AppIndicator support, for example. Everyone has statusbar icons: Mac and Windows users alike deal with them daily. When developing Wayland though, AppIndicators were deliberately removed because GNOME didn't intend to use them. Worse yet, the maintainers refused to even support it in wlroots, their pittance of a cross-platform desktop library. > I could kind of understand it with systemd, but X seems perpetually stuck in 2005. X is indeed terrible software, and it's functionality is stuck not just in 2005, but rather the mid-90s. I really hate Xorg, which makes it even more infuriating that Wayland: a. Doesn't support my hardware b. Doesn't support my desktop environment c. Makes it harder for me to stream my display, take screengrabs, and use my webcam d. Deliberately removed functionality that I use on a daily basis, forcing everyone adopting Wayland to write their own implementation of a basic feature. If I didn't know any better, I'd accuse Wayland of being a project deliberately designed to sabotage desktop Linux. It's a project with less ambition than Quartz, and less hardware/software support than x11. It has a weaker security model than the compositor in MacOS, and manages to have less features than even the compositor in Windows. How is that closer to "the future" than a feature-complete desktop from 30 years ago? The only truly excellent thing to come out of Wayland was PipeWire. But PipeWire works just fine on Xorg machines too, so I guess we're at an impasse. Wayland fractured the Linux desktop for good, there is no "way forward" anymore.
ews 4y ago
My desktop has been Wayland/sway for years and years, and it's incredibly stable (I am using Arch btw)
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Unless you have an nvidia graphics card in which case you can't use Wayland, or if you need to do screen sharing, or have multiple monitors and want to do screen sharing.
  - bandrami 4y ago
    Or want to run a program on one computer and have its GUI display on another (people still act like VNC/Spice is an answer here but it's parsecs behind). Or want to write a client that can tell if it is in view or not. Or...
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    People who have been choosing nvidia gfx cards in the last 2 decades to run linux desktop are these kind of people who tend to accumulate shitty life decisions so they can pose as victims and blame the states and the whole world to be against them. You can't really raise the nvidia flag in an argumentative in a linux desktop discussion unless you want everybody to know you don't really want things to work well.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      I learned the hard way. :(
  - darthrupert 4y ago
    1. Don’t have an nvidia graphics card 2. Screen sharing just works
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      1. My desktop I had a Radeon 5700XT, no issues in Wayland except screen sharing. On my Laptop I didn't know that wayland+nvidia sucked. Wow opened up firefox and the whole DE froze for like a minute. 2. Na, it doesn't just work. If you use firefox, Google Meet cannot detect the screen. If you use chrome but have multiple monitors it only detects the primary monitor. It's such a pain when Xorg just works.
saati 4y ago
What do you mean Wayland isn't going to happen, I've been using it without major problems for years.
- bandrami 4y ago
  You and roughly one-fifth of the Linux desktop userbase. And good for you! I'm really glad it works for your use cases. But when people say "Wayland isn't going to happen" they mean that one-fifth is going to asymptotically approach two-fifths, maybe, over time. Until Wayland has the capabilities of X ca. 2008 it's not going to replace X in actual use.
darthrupert 4y ago
Wayland is already here, and swaywm is the number one reason why I’m sticking with Linux instead of falling back to MacOS.
jl6 4y ago
Are you not a little worried about running such an old OS that no longer receives security updates? Is it airgapped/offline/isolated?

cowtools 4y ago

Wayland doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to an improvement over Xorg, which is hampered by its complexity and reverse compatibility.

uecker 4y ago
I do not think the criticism of Xorg is really correct. At its core, it is actually a nice and well-designed protocol. It is also rock-solid, works without any problem in all my configurations, and supports remote desktop.
lmm 4y ago
> Wayland doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to an improvement over Xorg Agreed, but it shows no signs of ever achieving that. Yes, it has mixed DPI support, which is not nothing, but that doesn't generally make up for the areas where it doesn't have parity with Xorg and never intends to reach that parity. (Network transparency, screen recording, ...) > which is hampered by its complexity and reverse compatibility Users don't care about technical elegance. If and when those things start causing user-visible issues with Xorg then Wayland might get a chance.

MarioMan 4y ago

>There are many things my 2010 era Core2Duo running Ubuntu 10.04 can do that my fancy new Ryzen desktop with Debian 11 can't and won't ever be able to do. Things I cannot give up because they're too important for my daily life. This has me curious: What sorts of tasks are you doing that only work on a machine like this? I love finding new things to do with old hardware, so I'm interested in your insights.

youngNed 4y ago
i'm going to guess its a Thinkpad, x200? t410? maybe even an x61. People (myself included) still use those, not because they do anything more in particular, but they feel great to use, nicely weighted and a stunning[1] keyboard [1]ymmv, but personally the keyboard on an x61 is perfection, the screen however is very very very far from perfection
- digitallyfree 4y ago
  If it's the feeling of the hardware alone then the Thinkpad could be used as a thin client to access a modern, more powerful system. Personally I'm curious about the "many things" the C2D with Ubuntu 10 can do that the new one can't - is it some legacy software that can't run on a newer os, or something else?
- chi42 4y ago
  Man I loved my x61. It was like the duracell bunny. It was in my apartment in 2011 when the building burned down. The roof collapsed on it and the only thing I had to fix was the screen backlight. I used that laptop until 2020.

dsr_ 4y ago

Have you considered pulling your Ubuntu desktop into a VM running on the Ryzen? Let it transcend the mortal shell in which it was born.

robotresearcher 4y ago
Your now-immortal VM could run faster while using less power, even with the virtualization overhead.

ntoskrnl 4y ago

Most of the bigger distros have already switched to wayland. It's pretty much inevitable that the rest follow eventually. https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2021/10/distros-which-adopted-wayland-in-2021.html https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2021/10/distros-which-adopted-way...

w4rh4wk5 4y ago
Well, most distros also ship X and allow you to choose at login. I'd imagine quite a lot of people are still running X since there's always something that does not play nice with Wayland. My favorite: drag-and-drop from file-roller into nautilus. [1] [1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4
- corrral 4y ago
  Drag & Drop is an action I had to consciously work to start using when I switched to macOS, a little over a decade ago. Windows and Linux had trained me never to use it, aside from moving files around in Explorer or whatever, because it so often caused crashes, did the wrong thing, or made programs glitch out in weird ways (that last one was mostly Linux). Sure enough, I found a repeatable drag & drop application crash in KDE in my first few minutes of use, last time I poked my head into the desktop Linux world (Ubuntu, in this case) again, a couple years back.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    How did Windows train you not to use drag and drop? It's never not worked. Same with OSX. Yet Linux you have to live without it, asking questions on reddit or discord/irc results in 'use the command line to move the file'... which is a bit absurd.
    - krinkaow 4y ago
      An example: Drag&Drop from 7-zip or winrar causes an extraction to a temporary folder, then copied from there making it take much longer than doing "extract to folder" directly.

horsawlarway 4y ago

lawl - wayland has already happened. Also, and more seriously - I think I'm not going to take you at your word on this one: There are many things my 2010 era Core2Duo running Ubuntu 10.04 can do that my fancy new Ryzen desktop with Debian 11 can't and won't ever be able to do. Things I cannot give up because they're too important for my daily life. I'd love to see a real example instead of this pithy line. My strong (STRONG) suspicion is that anything you can do on that old machine can be done on the new one just fine - although you might have to adjust a bit or learn a new tool, and that can be painful and annoying.

akagusu 4y ago
Wayland is at best a work in progress. And if you consider that they made Wayland default on GNOME to force adoption and users usually go to Internet seeking for advice on how to switch back to X11 on GNOME, we will probably wait a long time for Wayland happen.
- christophilus 4y ago
  I’ve been using it happily for over a year with no real issues. But I do share your concern. I like the variety and choice of WMs on Linux and the Gnome / Wayland crowd do seem to add friction to the other contenders.
  - akagusu 4y ago
    > I like the variety and choice of WMs on Linux and the Gnome / Wayland crowd do seem to add friction to the other contenders. This is a big problem because this friction they add on purpose hurts users of other wm/desktops that don't get their preferred wm/de working correctly. And it also hurts other open-source developers because it seems the only ones doing something right are the Gnome devs, when in fact the others devs are having problems only because Gnome devs.
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      The Gnome dev do not force anyone on anything, especially regarding parts of the linux desktop they don't develop themselves. This is just conspiracy theory.

hyperion2010 4y ago

I love the point in there that it isn't actually xorg vs wayland, it is xorg vs dbus. Wayland is so deficient that basically everything has to depend on dbus if it doesn't want to use X. This framing clarifies the issue substantially, because whatever people think about wayland, they might have some slightly different opinions about dbus.

rrix2 4y ago
> slightly different opinions about dbus Recently i updated my machine and it would fail to boot because NetworkManager-wait-online.service's invocation of `nm-online -s` would fail even when NM was connected, even when `nm-online` actual liveness check would succeed. I spent hours reading NM code, wading through auto-generated GObject introspections and their XML bullshit to try to figure out why org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.startup was true, what the magic numbers in org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Connection.Active.StateFlags meant, why my desktop wouldn't boot and couldn't even find what could could cause the state to change before I finally gave up and patched nm-wait-online to just invoke the codepath which did an actual liveness check rather than bumble through a bunch of dbus interfaces. Gotta say I was missing the old KDE3 dcop after that... IPC is still such a PITA on linux.

stinkytaco 4y ago

> Wayland isn't going to happen. I'd be very disappointed by this because I'm in a mixed DPI environment and I need its support. Seriously though, I find hostility toward Wayland so weird. I could kind of understand it with systemd, but X seems perpetually stuck in 2005.

smoldesu 4y ago
> Seriously though, I find hostility toward Wayland so weird. I think the hostility towards Wayland is pretty justified. It's a backdoor power-grab by the GNOME foundation and Red Hat, much like Flatpak, Libadwaita, and to a limited extent, systemd. I, like many others, am totally exhausted of GNOME trying to be the center of the desktop universe. Every couple years, they decide to redouble their development efforts on some useless, stopgap tool that ultimately ends up being underdeveloped and redundant. Making matters worse, they announce $PROGRAM to be the next big feature of Linux, and anyone who's refusing to embrace it is a luddite. In reality, most people can't switch to these alternatives because they're niche, and don't provide the same degree of functionality as their favorite Window Manager. Furthermore, people don't hate the idea of something replacing X, people hate the fact that Wayland has been in development for more than a decade and is still considerably worse than Xorg with objectively less features and functionality. Adding insult to injury, a majority of these omissions are deliberately removed by the maintainers because the GNOME desktop doesn't need it, therefore everyone else doesn't. Take AppIndicator support, for example. Everyone has statusbar icons: Mac and Windows users alike deal with them daily. When developing Wayland though, AppIndicators were deliberately removed because GNOME didn't intend to use them. Worse yet, the maintainers refused to even support it in wlroots, their pittance of a cross-platform desktop library. > I could kind of understand it with systemd, but X seems perpetually stuck in 2005. X is indeed terrible software, and it's functionality is stuck not just in 2005, but rather the mid-90s. I really hate Xorg, which makes it even more infuriating that Wayland: a. Doesn't support my hardware b. Doesn't support my desktop environment c. Makes it harder for me to stream my display, take screengrabs, and use my webcam d. Deliberately removed functionality that I use on a daily basis, forcing everyone adopting Wayland to write their own implementation of a basic feature. If I didn't know any better, I'd accuse Wayland of being a project deliberately designed to sabotage desktop Linux. It's a project with less ambition than Quartz, and less hardware/software support than x11. It has a weaker security model than the compositor in MacOS, and manages to have less features than even the compositor in Windows. How is that closer to "the future" than a feature-complete desktop from 30 years ago? The only truly excellent thing to come out of Wayland was PipeWire. But PipeWire works just fine on Xorg machines too, so I guess we're at an impasse. Wayland fractured the Linux desktop for good, there is no "way forward" anymore.

ews 4y ago

My desktop has been Wayland/sway for years and years, and it's incredibly stable (I am using Arch btw)

philliphaydon 4y ago
Unless you have an nvidia graphics card in which case you can't use Wayland, or if you need to do screen sharing, or have multiple monitors and want to do screen sharing.
- bandrami 4y ago
  Or want to run a program on one computer and have its GUI display on another (people still act like VNC/Spice is an answer here but it's parsecs behind). Or want to write a client that can tell if it is in view or not. Or...
- prmoustache 4y ago
  People who have been choosing nvidia gfx cards in the last 2 decades to run linux desktop are these kind of people who tend to accumulate shitty life decisions so they can pose as victims and blame the states and the whole world to be against them. You can't really raise the nvidia flag in an argumentative in a linux desktop discussion unless you want everybody to know you don't really want things to work well.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    I learned the hard way. :(
- darthrupert 4y ago
  1. Don’t have an nvidia graphics card 2. Screen sharing just works
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    1. My desktop I had a Radeon 5700XT, no issues in Wayland except screen sharing. On my Laptop I didn't know that wayland+nvidia sucked. Wow opened up firefox and the whole DE froze for like a minute. 2. Na, it doesn't just work. If you use firefox, Google Meet cannot detect the screen. If you use chrome but have multiple monitors it only detects the primary monitor. It's such a pain when Xorg just works.

saati 4y ago

What do you mean Wayland isn't going to happen, I've been using it without major problems for years.

bandrami 4y ago
You and roughly one-fifth of the Linux desktop userbase. And good for you! I'm really glad it works for your use cases. But when people say "Wayland isn't going to happen" they mean that one-fifth is going to asymptotically approach two-fifths, maybe, over time. Until Wayland has the capabilities of X ca. 2008 it's not going to replace X in actual use.

darthrupert 4y ago

Wayland is already here, and swaywm is the number one reason why I’m sticking with Linux instead of falling back to MacOS.

jl6 4y ago

Are you not a little worried about running such an old OS that no longer receives security updates? Is it airgapped/offline/isolated?