7 ms·

If I had to use a Desktop environment in Linux, it would be XFCE. But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I have no abandoned Linux and

by jmclnx 2y ago

If I had to use a Desktop environment in Linux, it would be XFCE. But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I have no abandoned Linux and I doubt Wayland will become mandatory until Firefox stops supporting X.

hggigg 2y ago
Could be worse. The whole Gnome 3 and Wayland thing pushed me to macOS.
- linguae 2y ago
  I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services, have harmed the Mac experience. The issue of soldered RAM and storage in particular pushed me back to Windows after more than 15 years of using Macs (which is a shame since Apple's ARM hardware is awesome when it comes to performance and energy consumption); the last time I used Windows as my daily-driver OS was during the XP era. Unfortunately I don't like any of the mainstream desktop operating systems; Windows is annoying and loves to get in the way, macOS is becoming increasingly annoying with each release and is also tied to hardware with massive prices for RAM and storage upgrades with no DIY options like in the past, and the Linux desktop has a Sisyphean development cycle with so much churn. Instead of working on refining the user experience and polishing applications like LibreOffice to make them more competitive to Microsoft Office, it seems like every few years there are major infrastructure changes that require major code changes or even rewrites. I'm quite disillusioned with desktop computing in general. Microsoft and Google are leading the way with "enshittification" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and the Mac experience in 2024 isn't like what it was in 2009 when the Mac was at its peak, in my opinion. The Linux desktop ecosystem suffers from a lack of funding relative to its commercial peers, combined with the "organization from chaos" that comes with bazaar-style development. The X11 to Wayland transition would be easier to pull off if the Linux desktop has Microsoft- or Apple-levels of funding and cooperation, but such funding doesn't exist, and part of the characteristic of the bazaar is that developers and teams of developers get to work on projects of their own interest and its the community that "votes" on projects by using them. The bazaar definitely exhibits freedom, but the major downside is that major changes in infrastructure (such as the X11 to Wayland transition) could take a lot of time and have major pain points (for example, the development of incompatible Wayland compositors and the fact that the X11 concept of a window manager doesn't exactly translate to Wayland's concepts). I love free, open source software, but I'm drawn more to cathedral-style projects such as the BSDs and HaikuOS where there is a coherent vision for the system. Unfortunately the BSDs are dependent on the broader FOSS ecosystem for desktops, which is dominated by the GNOME/KDE/Wayland ecosystem (which also priorities Linux and treats other Unix-like operating systems as an afterthought, but that's another discussion). I'll need to re-investigate HaikuOS to see whether it can be used as a daily driver today; I've seen that a lot of attention has been given to HaikuOS in recent years. I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the Newton, which involved a Lisp OS (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-bauhaus/ https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). But I have a busy day job and so this will take years of effort on the side.
  - hggigg 2y ago
    I'll be horribly blunt here but I don't give a shit about any of that any more. It's irrelevant which is why open source is a complete joke for most people. I, much as other users, just want my computer to solve the problems I ask of it, not turn into an activity in its own right or a maze of hosting problems and pain to get a simple task done. The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that. macOS is my dream OS as it stands. I can add a cucumber to my shopping list on my mac and when I get to the supermarket, it's on my phone. I can share a calendar with my family and it just works. I can listen to music on it and the same music is on my phone. I can open and move pages around in a PDF without having to futz with anything or open a terminal. I can literally write on my iPad with a pen and a PDF pops out full of my writing which I can send to people for review and feedback. I can use Lightroom, Photoshop and Excel, which are far superior to any open source products and I do not mind paying for that privilege. etc etc. The hardware cost and upgrade inflexibility, neither of which I have found a problem either way, is insignificant anyway to the pain I would incur without it. And that's what the community does't get: the last 20% is the hard bit and the above is the last 20% and it has never even once in the history of OSS got anywhere even remotely near that. No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it.
    - cesarb 2y ago
      > No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it. No one cares, until they do. Everything you mentioned depends on a single company, which follows the commands from just a few people, who can one day decide to lead the operating system in a direction which makes it no longer your "dream OS", and intellectual property law makes it so that no other company can undo their changes. > The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that. We haven't, and that's why we prefer operating systems we fully control, instead of being bound by the whims of some foreign megacorporation, enforced by intellectual property law.
      - hggigg 2y ago
        The other side of the fence is just as bad. Look at what Redhat and Freedesktop did to Linux. While you might have the illusion of control, the exit plan to take control is to take on tens of millions of lines of source code and manage it yourself. That is not control. Your data is the important bit. If you keep that portable and/or recreatable then it doesn't matter what tools you use.
jmspring 2y ago
When I've had servers with a desktop env, it's always been FreeBSD and XFCE.
exe34 2y ago
I'm on X11 still and completely ignored the train wreck, hoping it'll go away eventually.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  It's not going to go away. Wayland is here to stay.
  - mkgreen 2y ago
    And so is X11. We are heading for a dual stack desktops. There are tons of expensive applications that target Linux _because_ of X11 and they will rather force users to switch OSes than get rewritten.
    - ac29 2y ago
      If the apps target Linux/X11, wouldnt they also have to be rewritten to switch OS?
      - mkgreen 2y ago
        There are other Unix systems but by far the easiest solution is simply making sure all installed apps can still behave as X11 clients. Wayland or Xwayland is not really any issue. Few people use Xorg directly, as the new deployments usually require some form of a remote access.
    - cesarb 2y ago
      > And so is X11. We are heading for a dual stack desktops. IMO, we're heading for "X11 over Wayland" desktops, in which the only X11 implementation is Xwayland. These expensive applications which target X11 will keep working, through that compatibility layer.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      Pretty much any app that uses a toolkit won't need to be rewritten. Most of them just need small changes, or even no changes. Those that are written to use Xlib directly, sure, they'll take some work (though rewritten? doubtful). If their maintainers don't want to do that, they'll still run under Xwayland.
talldayo 2y ago
Don't look now: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/
badgersnake 2y ago
Sway works fine on FreeBSD. I haven’t figured out the magic dbus (I guess) incantations required to make screen sharing work without systemd though. I guess it needs pipewire at least.
EasyMark 2y ago
I thought XFCE worked on *BSD as well?
bitwize 2y ago
This "Wayland thing" is what the X devs would rather work on instead of X. It's the future. Best to rip the Band-Aid off now.
- AlienRobot 2y ago
  I used Windows 7 until Steam stopped working. The band-aid stays on.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Perhaps if the X devs want people to migrate, they should consider giving Wayland all the features of X. Otherwise people are going to keep using the thing that works.
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    > all the features of X I don't think Wayland should add a print server ;)
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      No, but there should exist a print server that Wayland applications can use. I don't object to refactors and replacements, but the underlying features should still exist.
  - consteval 2y ago
    There's 0 point in making a new software if you're just going to inherit all the fundamental design flaws that make the original software unmaintainable.
- erik_seaberg 2y ago
  GPUs live in desktops and phones, but apps live in remote datacenters, so the future seems to be sending rendering commands to Javascript frontends on end users' browsers.
  - 2y ago

by jmclnx 2y ago

hggigg 2y ago

Could be worse. The whole Gnome 3 and Wayland thing pushed me to macOS.

linguae 2y ago
I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services, have harmed the Mac experience. The issue of soldered RAM and storage in particular pushed me back to Windows after more than 15 years of using Macs (which is a shame since Apple's ARM hardware is awesome when it comes to performance and energy consumption); the last time I used Windows as my daily-driver OS was during the XP era. Unfortunately I don't like any of the mainstream desktop operating systems; Windows is annoying and loves to get in the way, macOS is becoming increasingly annoying with each release and is also tied to hardware with massive prices for RAM and storage upgrades with no DIY options like in the past, and the Linux desktop has a Sisyphean development cycle with so much churn. Instead of working on refining the user experience and polishing applications like LibreOffice to make them more competitive to Microsoft Office, it seems like every few years there are major infrastructure changes that require major code changes or even rewrites. I'm quite disillusioned with desktop computing in general. Microsoft and Google are leading the way with "enshittification" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and the Mac experience in 2024 isn't like what it was in 2009 when the Mac was at its peak, in my opinion. The Linux desktop ecosystem suffers from a lack of funding relative to its commercial peers, combined with the "organization from chaos" that comes with bazaar-style development. The X11 to Wayland transition would be easier to pull off if the Linux desktop has Microsoft- or Apple-levels of funding and cooperation, but such funding doesn't exist, and part of the characteristic of the bazaar is that developers and teams of developers get to work on projects of their own interest and its the community that "votes" on projects by using them. The bazaar definitely exhibits freedom, but the major downside is that major changes in infrastructure (such as the X11 to Wayland transition) could take a lot of time and have major pain points (for example, the development of incompatible Wayland compositors and the fact that the X11 concept of a window manager doesn't exactly translate to Wayland's concepts). I love free, open source software, but I'm drawn more to cathedral-style projects such as the BSDs and HaikuOS where there is a coherent vision for the system. Unfortunately the BSDs are dependent on the broader FOSS ecosystem for desktops, which is dominated by the GNOME/KDE/Wayland ecosystem (which also priorities Linux and treats other Unix-like operating systems as an afterthought, but that's another discussion). I'll need to re-investigate HaikuOS to see whether it can be used as a daily driver today; I've seen that a lot of attention has been given to HaikuOS in recent years. I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the Newton, which involved a Lisp OS (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-bauhaus/ https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). But I have a busy day job and so this will take years of effort on the side.
- hggigg 2y ago
  I'll be horribly blunt here but I don't give a shit about any of that any more. It's irrelevant which is why open source is a complete joke for most people. I, much as other users, just want my computer to solve the problems I ask of it, not turn into an activity in its own right or a maze of hosting problems and pain to get a simple task done. The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that. macOS is my dream OS as it stands. I can add a cucumber to my shopping list on my mac and when I get to the supermarket, it's on my phone. I can share a calendar with my family and it just works. I can listen to music on it and the same music is on my phone. I can open and move pages around in a PDF without having to futz with anything or open a terminal. I can literally write on my iPad with a pen and a PDF pops out full of my writing which I can send to people for review and feedback. I can use Lightroom, Photoshop and Excel, which are far superior to any open source products and I do not mind paying for that privilege. etc etc. The hardware cost and upgrade inflexibility, neither of which I have found a problem either way, is insignificant anyway to the pain I would incur without it. And that's what the community does't get: the last 20% is the hard bit and the above is the last 20% and it has never even once in the history of OSS got anywhere even remotely near that. No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it.
  - cesarb 2y ago
    > No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it. No one cares, until they do. Everything you mentioned depends on a single company, which follows the commands from just a few people, who can one day decide to lead the operating system in a direction which makes it no longer your "dream OS", and intellectual property law makes it so that no other company can undo their changes. > The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that. We haven't, and that's why we prefer operating systems we fully control, instead of being bound by the whims of some foreign megacorporation, enforced by intellectual property law.
    - hggigg 2y ago
      The other side of the fence is just as bad. Look at what Redhat and Freedesktop did to Linux. While you might have the illusion of control, the exit plan to take control is to take on tens of millions of lines of source code and manage it yourself. That is not control. Your data is the important bit. If you keep that portable and/or recreatable then it doesn't matter what tools you use.

jmspring 2y ago

When I've had servers with a desktop env, it's always been FreeBSD and XFCE.

exe34 2y ago

I'm on X11 still and completely ignored the train wreck, hoping it'll go away eventually.

EasyMark 2y ago
It's not going to go away. Wayland is here to stay.
- mkgreen 2y ago
  And so is X11. We are heading for a dual stack desktops. There are tons of expensive applications that target Linux _because_ of X11 and they will rather force users to switch OSes than get rewritten.
  - ac29 2y ago
    If the apps target Linux/X11, wouldnt they also have to be rewritten to switch OS?
    - mkgreen 2y ago
      There are other Unix systems but by far the easiest solution is simply making sure all installed apps can still behave as X11 clients. Wayland or Xwayland is not really any issue. Few people use Xorg directly, as the new deployments usually require some form of a remote access.
  - cesarb 2y ago
    > And so is X11. We are heading for a dual stack desktops. IMO, we're heading for "X11 over Wayland" desktops, in which the only X11 implementation is Xwayland. These expensive applications which target X11 will keep working, through that compatibility layer.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    Pretty much any app that uses a toolkit won't need to be rewritten. Most of them just need small changes, or even no changes. Those that are written to use Xlib directly, sure, they'll take some work (though rewritten? doubtful). If their maintainers don't want to do that, they'll still run under Xwayland.

talldayo 2y ago

Don't look now: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/

badgersnake 2y ago

Sway works fine on FreeBSD. I haven’t figured out the magic dbus (I guess) incantations required to make screen sharing work without systemd though. I guess it needs pipewire at least.

EasyMark 2y ago

I thought XFCE worked on *BSD as well?

bitwize 2y ago

This "Wayland thing" is what the X devs would rather work on instead of X. It's the future. Best to rip the Band-Aid off now.

AlienRobot 2y ago
I used Windows 7 until Steam stopped working. The band-aid stays on.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Perhaps if the X devs want people to migrate, they should consider giving Wayland all the features of X. Otherwise people are going to keep using the thing that works.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  > all the features of X I don't think Wayland should add a print server ;)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    No, but there should exist a print server that Wayland applications can use. I don't object to refactors and replacements, but the underlying features should still exist.
- consteval 2y ago
  There's 0 point in making a new software if you're just going to inherit all the fundamental design flaws that make the original software unmaintainable.
erik_seaberg 2y ago
GPUs live in desktops and phones, but apps live in remote datacenters, so the future seems to be sending rendering commands to Javascript frontends on end users' browsers.
- 2y ago