7 ms·

Qt isn't dying off. They're removing old versions of it from the distribution repositories. (Or well, trying to, anyways.) Yes, it's neat that you can still co

by jchw 2y ago

Qt isn't dying off. They're removing old versions of it from the distribution repositories. (Or well, trying to, anyways.) Yes, it's neat that you can still compile and run ancient Win32 programs on modern Windows, but maintaining all of that compatibility is a burden Microsoft was able to bear. The open source community is still struggling to try to provide a compelling desktop experience without this burden. Can you run ancient old Linux graphical software? Well, to an extent... Yes. Is it easy? ...No. At least, it's certainly not as easy as installing stuff from your OS vendor directly. As far as Wayland goes, there are no plans to get rid of XWayland any time soon. I'd wager it will remain in the toolkit for decades to come, and if anything, XWayland support keeps getting better rather than worse; just look at what KDE has been doing. Usually, when I want to try to run something really old I'll use the Docker debian/eol[1] images. Getting X11 apps to work inside of Docker requires a bit of fidgeting, but once you have it working, it's relatively straight-forward to install or build and use software inside of. The Linux desktop is necessarily going to keep going through large breaking shifts because well, it sucks. It needs to go through breakages. When the new thing also seems to suck, that hints that it might need to continue to break more. It's going to take a while to iron things out, especially because designing systems is hard and sometimes new ideas don't wind up panning out very well. (This has caused a lot of trouble with Wayland where a lot of ideas, indeed, did not pan out super well in practice in my opinion.) That said, I think we can do much work to improve interoperability with older software, and ensure that it can continue to run in the future. But, it doesn't have to, and really, shouldn't work by keeping everything else from moving. [1]: https://hub.docker.com/r/debian/eol https://hub.docker.com/r/debian/eol

chgs 2y ago
I find it amusing that there’s this constant assetion on this forum that the Linux desktop sucks Yet many of us have been quite happy with it for decades, and the major problems tend to be with new stuff that seems to be added just to do something different.
- jchw 2y ago
  I have been using Linux as my primary operating system for two decades, and I think the Linux desktop sucks. I strongly disagree that my problems with it are largely the result of "new stuff that seems to be added just to do something different". When I first started using Linux, there was no kernel modesetting and XFree86 ran as root. I had to manually configure my graphics and display settings by editing the Xorg.conf in nano, or sometimes I could get YaST to do it. Multi-head output was not well-supported, and you often had to restart to reconfigure your outputs. Installing the NVIDIA driver was a straight up pain in the ass. (Some things never change.) X.Org eventually improved and added hotplugging. The Linux desktop stack went through a lot of "new stuff" like new versions of DRM/DRI, the addition of hotplugging, the introduction of KMS and libinput. Dynamic input configuration was added with the `xinput` command. The XInput2 extension was developed to greatly improve touch and pen tablet support. XRandr made it possible to dynamically arrange displays, replacing Xinerama. UI toolkits needed to be rewritten to support scalable rendering so that we could have high DPI support. Most recently, a lot of work and many new protocols across multiple parts of the desktop stack had to be re-hauled from kernel to userland to support explicit synchronization for graphics tasks and buffers. All of this required major shifts, and that broke user's workflows at some points. Plenty of people were broken by the gradual transition to using libinput, from graphics tablets to Synaptics touchpads, a lot of work had to be redone in order to re-haul the input system. Only recently are there Linux laptops where the out-of-the-box touchpad experience is good enough to rival a MacBook, and it's certainly not all of them. Don't get me wrong, I loved KDE 3. And despite all of it's flaws, I still prefer Linux greatly over the other options available. But would I go back to using Linux 2.6 and KDE 3 and etc. today? Fuck no, we've improved so many things since then. And yes, no question that at times things have felt like they've been moving backwards in some regards, but it really isn't for nothing. The fact that modern desktop Linux trivially hotplugs displays with different DPIs and refresh rates (and potentially variable refresh rates) is genuinely something that took a herculean effort. All of that work required massive rewrites. It required kernel changes, graphics driver changes, it required major UI toolkit changes, it required redesigning apps and rewriting components. And yes, I admit I am not the biggest contributor to open source or anything, my patches are mostly unimportant. But, when I hit something that sucks in the Linux desktop, I do try my best to see if I can't do something about it. I have contributed random little bits here and there to various projects I care about. Most recently, I've been doing work to improve some situations where thumbnails in KDE are suboptimal. There's easily thousands of these little small issues that make Linux worse to use on desktop, we've got plenty of work to do. And I make it work. Except for work-owned computers, all of my machines run Linux, and I have a fair number of them. I do not have a single box I own personally that boots any other kernel or any other desktop. I know my way around Wine, even enough to make occasional, if small, code contributions. (For example, I made a quick patch when graphics tablets were not working in Wine under XWayland.) So I'm not suggesting that it's unusable, but I can't recommend the Linux desktop to random people. It's been getting closer, but a lot of the reason it's getting closer is because of some of the efforts that I assume you'd complain about.
- andrewprock 2y ago
  Decades? Really? The UX was so bad in 1998 I just went back to windows for another decade.
  - chgs 2y ago
    25 years ago I was quite happy with enlightenment but moved to blackbox/fluxbox. Went to xfce around 2010ish though. Only issues I can think of that have every affected me were pulseaudio related.
  - smallerfish 2y ago
    Windows was so bad in 1999 that I switched to Linux and have been happy with it since.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  That's not a contradiction; Linux distros have problems, they just suck differently and probably less than Darwin or NT.
- anvuong 2y ago
  Coming from Windows and Mac, the multiple monitors experience on Linux is terrible, especially when the monitors have different refresh rates or different resolutions. It's getting a bit better with Ubuntu 24.10 but still not close to the smooth experience I have on Windows and Mac. Recently I needed to switch to Wayland due to my monitors setup. Then I also needed to write a small program that capture application screen, which is a stupidly simple thing to do on Windows, Mac, or even on Xorg. For Wayland I had to jump through bunch of stupid hoops just to get it kinda working ...
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Having to deal with windows on Windows regularly being placed on a monitor which didn't exist and windows on MacOS restoring to weird places... None of them are great. You get to choose your preferred set of problems.
- LooseMarmoset 2y ago
  The Linux desktop is pretty great, for the most part. I would say that in addition to a usable desktop, Linux distributions generally also provide a more stable Windows environment than Windows itself does. I have quite a suite of games in Steam and GoG, and I find that many older games that simply cannot be coaxed into running on Windows can be made to run happily on one version of Wine/Proton or another. There are still some weak areas in desktop Linux if you're running a desktop that isn't Gnome or Plasma - wifi configuration comes to mind immediately, as does sound configuration. Bluetooth can be picky if you don't know to get all the non-free firmware. But really, we're living in a dream era of Linux desktops, if you happen to have lived through the early days of `startx` and XFree86. Hands up if you ever smoked a monitor coil with a bad X config file...
- wojciii 2y ago
  I use Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for work. I used the previous version until a few days ago. I had no resistance from my corporate overlords over this. I get my work done and I'm more effective as a developer. The corporate MS apps all work in a browser. I don't use any of the office apps for anything serious. The Linux desktop is here already and is accepted. Also KDE is quite nice and snappy most of the time.
acdha 2y ago
> Yes, it's neat that you can still compile and run ancient Win32 programs on modern Windows, but maintaining all of that compatibility is a burden Microsoft was able to bear. The open source community is still struggling to try to provide a compelling desktop experience without this burden. I always find it interesting how people talk about this as if Microsoft is just flipping a button rather than spending many millions of dollars on engineers to maintain compatibility. I’m reminded of the systemd arguments where the number of people who are vehement about the old ways being better just never seem to have time to show up to support them. This kind of stuff is expensive and the way to influence the decisions is to show up and chip in.
- 0x457 2y ago
  Well, that's because deep enterpise users have closed sourced software that cannot be updated (pick any reason, it doesn't matter which one) and they need that compatibility. MS needs to keep them vendor-locked to keep making money off them. That's not something that happens in Open Source Software world.
  - acdha 2y ago
    Yes. My point was just that it’s not free but it’s weird that done people expect the same level of support from open source projects which don’t receive anything like that much money.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > just never seem to have time to show up to support them. They're supported just fine. The authors feel no need to bend over backwards to fulfill oddball distribution requirements. > This kind of stuff is expensive Yet it all came into existence from open source developers who were paid nothing. Then a bunch of commercial distributions appeared. That's why it's expensive. They're twisting the community for their own profits rather than for broad improvement of the system as a whole. > to influence the decisions is to show up and chip in. I don't want to influence things or be required to. I would prefer if people who had "influence" just weren't part of the community. They're exceptionally disruptive and often not focused on users but on their own stature.
akira2501 2y ago
> The open source community is still struggling to try to provide a compelling desktop experience without this burden. What exactly is a "compelling desktop experience?" It seems to me that when people say this they really mean "win the popularity contest against Microsoft." I'm not sure that's at all a worthwhile or laudable goal. > Is it easy? ...No. It's incredibly easy. It just depends on what distribution you use. For example, on Gentoo, this is not at all a problem. > When the new thing also seems to suck, This is a hint that you got something wrong. Remember when desktops used to be configurable? I guess letting the user control their own environment stopped being "compelling" when Microsoft decided so. Do we have to follow suit?
- jchw 2y ago
  > What exactly is a "compelling desktop experience?" It seems to me that when people say this they really mean "win the popularity contest against Microsoft." I'm not sure that's at all a worthwhile or laudable goal. I don't care about Microsoft or Apple. I don't like Windows and I don't like macOS. I care about my desktop. The one that I am typing in. I really, really hope I don't actually have to explain all of the problems with the Linux desktop experience right now, I don't have the energy. I've helped a lot of people try to make Linux work for them and it's a soul-crushing experience every time because I often have to explain that there is in fact, no great options for them right now because shit is simply broken. The X11 and Wayland situation is a perfect example: "Oh no problem. You can just choose between your windows scaling properly and your high refresh rate monitor working, and being able to actually use screensharing during meetings." Sure it's getting better, but we've got a lot of work to go, there's no sugarcoating it. > It's incredibly easy. It just depends on what distribution you use. For example, on Gentoo, this is not at all a problem. Look, if the person has to be proficient enough to be able to install and operate Gentoo as their primary desktop operating system, I'm pretty sure they do not need my help when it comes to doing virtually anything with Linux. It's also pretty easy to run old versions of software on NixOS but I'd argue this is basically cheating. What's hard to do is take any of the most popular distros and run something from 1999. (I'm pretty sure that's actually generally hard to do on Gentoo as well, but whatever.) That's what I'm really talking about. > This is a hint that you got something wrong. Remember when desktops used to be configurable? I guess letting the user control their own environment stopped being "compelling" when Microsoft decided so. Do we have to follow suit? What exactly about modern KDE isn't configurable enough? I use both KDE and SwayWM as daily driver desktop setups and never felt hindered much by the available configuration options. If anything, KDE offers so much customization that it's probably sometimes detrimental. Configuration options come at a cost, and that's exactly why modern software has less of it. We want higher quality software, but it's hard to make software more robust when you have trillions of code paths and most of them are almost completely unused. This stuff adds up. In a similar vein, I hate to see Linux lose support for old hardware, but if something's been broken in mainline for five years straight, I'm pretty sure they have every reason to assume it's not being used by anyone. What I'm really talking about with "the new thing also sucks" is more reflecting on the growing pains of things like Wayland and PulseAudio (and a bit with Pipewire though less so.) I am of course not saying that the same thing doesn't happen with desktop environments, personally I don't like GNOME 3, but also in the same vein, it'd be hard to argue GNOME 3 has been getting worse this whole time, it offers much more customization and is a lot more robust than it was when it first launched.

by jchw 2y ago

chgs 2y ago

I find it amusing that there’s this constant assetion on this forum that the Linux desktop sucks Yet many of us have been quite happy with it for decades, and the major problems tend to be with new stuff that seems to be added just to do something different.

jchw 2y ago
I have been using Linux as my primary operating system for two decades, and I think the Linux desktop sucks. I strongly disagree that my problems with it are largely the result of "new stuff that seems to be added just to do something different". When I first started using Linux, there was no kernel modesetting and XFree86 ran as root. I had to manually configure my graphics and display settings by editing the Xorg.conf in nano, or sometimes I could get YaST to do it. Multi-head output was not well-supported, and you often had to restart to reconfigure your outputs. Installing the NVIDIA driver was a straight up pain in the ass. (Some things never change.) X.Org eventually improved and added hotplugging. The Linux desktop stack went through a lot of "new stuff" like new versions of DRM/DRI, the addition of hotplugging, the introduction of KMS and libinput. Dynamic input configuration was added with the `xinput` command. The XInput2 extension was developed to greatly improve touch and pen tablet support. XRandr made it possible to dynamically arrange displays, replacing Xinerama. UI toolkits needed to be rewritten to support scalable rendering so that we could have high DPI support. Most recently, a lot of work and many new protocols across multiple parts of the desktop stack had to be re-hauled from kernel to userland to support explicit synchronization for graphics tasks and buffers. All of this required major shifts, and that broke user's workflows at some points. Plenty of people were broken by the gradual transition to using libinput, from graphics tablets to Synaptics touchpads, a lot of work had to be redone in order to re-haul the input system. Only recently are there Linux laptops where the out-of-the-box touchpad experience is good enough to rival a MacBook, and it's certainly not all of them. Don't get me wrong, I loved KDE 3. And despite all of it's flaws, I still prefer Linux greatly over the other options available. But would I go back to using Linux 2.6 and KDE 3 and etc. today? Fuck no, we've improved so many things since then. And yes, no question that at times things have felt like they've been moving backwards in some regards, but it really isn't for nothing. The fact that modern desktop Linux trivially hotplugs displays with different DPIs and refresh rates (and potentially variable refresh rates) is genuinely something that took a herculean effort. All of that work required massive rewrites. It required kernel changes, graphics driver changes, it required major UI toolkit changes, it required redesigning apps and rewriting components. And yes, I admit I am not the biggest contributor to open source or anything, my patches are mostly unimportant. But, when I hit something that sucks in the Linux desktop, I do try my best to see if I can't do something about it. I have contributed random little bits here and there to various projects I care about. Most recently, I've been doing work to improve some situations where thumbnails in KDE are suboptimal. There's easily thousands of these little small issues that make Linux worse to use on desktop, we've got plenty of work to do. And I make it work. Except for work-owned computers, all of my machines run Linux, and I have a fair number of them. I do not have a single box I own personally that boots any other kernel or any other desktop. I know my way around Wine, even enough to make occasional, if small, code contributions. (For example, I made a quick patch when graphics tablets were not working in Wine under XWayland.) So I'm not suggesting that it's unusable, but I can't recommend the Linux desktop to random people. It's been getting closer, but a lot of the reason it's getting closer is because of some of the efforts that I assume you'd complain about.
andrewprock 2y ago
Decades? Really? The UX was so bad in 1998 I just went back to windows for another decade.
- chgs 2y ago
  25 years ago I was quite happy with enlightenment but moved to blackbox/fluxbox. Went to xfce around 2010ish though. Only issues I can think of that have every affected me were pulseaudio related.
- smallerfish 2y ago
  Windows was so bad in 1999 that I switched to Linux and have been happy with it since.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
That's not a contradiction; Linux distros have problems, they just suck differently and probably less than Darwin or NT.
anvuong 2y ago
Coming from Windows and Mac, the multiple monitors experience on Linux is terrible, especially when the monitors have different refresh rates or different resolutions. It's getting a bit better with Ubuntu 24.10 but still not close to the smooth experience I have on Windows and Mac. Recently I needed to switch to Wayland due to my monitors setup. Then I also needed to write a small program that capture application screen, which is a stupidly simple thing to do on Windows, Mac, or even on Xorg. For Wayland I had to jump through bunch of stupid hoops just to get it kinda working ...
- viraptor 2y ago
  Having to deal with windows on Windows regularly being placed on a monitor which didn't exist and windows on MacOS restoring to weird places... None of them are great. You get to choose your preferred set of problems.
LooseMarmoset 2y ago
The Linux desktop is pretty great, for the most part. I would say that in addition to a usable desktop, Linux distributions generally also provide a more stable Windows environment than Windows itself does. I have quite a suite of games in Steam and GoG, and I find that many older games that simply cannot be coaxed into running on Windows can be made to run happily on one version of Wine/Proton or another. There are still some weak areas in desktop Linux if you're running a desktop that isn't Gnome or Plasma - wifi configuration comes to mind immediately, as does sound configuration. Bluetooth can be picky if you don't know to get all the non-free firmware. But really, we're living in a dream era of Linux desktops, if you happen to have lived through the early days of `startx` and XFree86. Hands up if you ever smoked a monitor coil with a bad X config file...
wojciii 2y ago
I use Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for work. I used the previous version until a few days ago. I had no resistance from my corporate overlords over this. I get my work done and I'm more effective as a developer. The corporate MS apps all work in a browser. I don't use any of the office apps for anything serious. The Linux desktop is here already and is accepted. Also KDE is quite nice and snappy most of the time.

acdha 2y ago

> Yes, it's neat that you can still compile and run ancient Win32 programs on modern Windows, but maintaining all of that compatibility is a burden Microsoft was able to bear. The open source community is still struggling to try to provide a compelling desktop experience without this burden. I always find it interesting how people talk about this as if Microsoft is just flipping a button rather than spending many millions of dollars on engineers to maintain compatibility. I’m reminded of the systemd arguments where the number of people who are vehement about the old ways being better just never seem to have time to show up to support them. This kind of stuff is expensive and the way to influence the decisions is to show up and chip in.

0x457 2y ago
Well, that's because deep enterpise users have closed sourced software that cannot be updated (pick any reason, it doesn't matter which one) and they need that compatibility. MS needs to keep them vendor-locked to keep making money off them. That's not something that happens in Open Source Software world.
- acdha 2y ago
  Yes. My point was just that it’s not free but it’s weird that done people expect the same level of support from open source projects which don’t receive anything like that much money.
akira2501 2y ago
> just never seem to have time to show up to support them. They're supported just fine. The authors feel no need to bend over backwards to fulfill oddball distribution requirements. > This kind of stuff is expensive Yet it all came into existence from open source developers who were paid nothing. Then a bunch of commercial distributions appeared. That's why it's expensive. They're twisting the community for their own profits rather than for broad improvement of the system as a whole. > to influence the decisions is to show up and chip in. I don't want to influence things or be required to. I would prefer if people who had "influence" just weren't part of the community. They're exceptionally disruptive and often not focused on users but on their own stature.

akira2501 2y ago

> The open source community is still struggling to try to provide a compelling desktop experience without this burden. What exactly is a "compelling desktop experience?" It seems to me that when people say this they really mean "win the popularity contest against Microsoft." I'm not sure that's at all a worthwhile or laudable goal. > Is it easy? ...No. It's incredibly easy. It just depends on what distribution you use. For example, on Gentoo, this is not at all a problem. > When the new thing also seems to suck, This is a hint that you got something wrong. Remember when desktops used to be configurable? I guess letting the user control their own environment stopped being "compelling" when Microsoft decided so. Do we have to follow suit?

jchw 2y ago
> What exactly is a "compelling desktop experience?" It seems to me that when people say this they really mean "win the popularity contest against Microsoft." I'm not sure that's at all a worthwhile or laudable goal. I don't care about Microsoft or Apple. I don't like Windows and I don't like macOS. I care about my desktop. The one that I am typing in. I really, really hope I don't actually have to explain all of the problems with the Linux desktop experience right now, I don't have the energy. I've helped a lot of people try to make Linux work for them and it's a soul-crushing experience every time because I often have to explain that there is in fact, no great options for them right now because shit is simply broken. The X11 and Wayland situation is a perfect example: "Oh no problem. You can just choose between your windows scaling properly and your high refresh rate monitor working, and being able to actually use screensharing during meetings." Sure it's getting better, but we've got a lot of work to go, there's no sugarcoating it. > It's incredibly easy. It just depends on what distribution you use. For example, on Gentoo, this is not at all a problem. Look, if the person has to be proficient enough to be able to install and operate Gentoo as their primary desktop operating system, I'm pretty sure they do not need my help when it comes to doing virtually anything with Linux. It's also pretty easy to run old versions of software on NixOS but I'd argue this is basically cheating. What's hard to do is take any of the most popular distros and run something from 1999. (I'm pretty sure that's actually generally hard to do on Gentoo as well, but whatever.) That's what I'm really talking about. > This is a hint that you got something wrong. Remember when desktops used to be configurable? I guess letting the user control their own environment stopped being "compelling" when Microsoft decided so. Do we have to follow suit? What exactly about modern KDE isn't configurable enough? I use both KDE and SwayWM as daily driver desktop setups and never felt hindered much by the available configuration options. If anything, KDE offers so much customization that it's probably sometimes detrimental. Configuration options come at a cost, and that's exactly why modern software has less of it. We want higher quality software, but it's hard to make software more robust when you have trillions of code paths and most of them are almost completely unused. This stuff adds up. In a similar vein, I hate to see Linux lose support for old hardware, but if something's been broken in mainline for five years straight, I'm pretty sure they have every reason to assume it's not being used by anyone. What I'm really talking about with "the new thing also sucks" is more reflecting on the growing pains of things like Wayland and PulseAudio (and a bit with Pipewire though less so.) I am of course not saying that the same thing doesn't happen with desktop environments, personally I don't like GNOME 3, but also in the same vein, it'd be hard to argue GNOME 3 has been getting worse this whole time, it offers much more customization and is a lot more robust than it was when it first launched.