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It's a bit deeper than just a series of bugs. For all of Linux's power and freedom, its modern desktop architecture is extremely restrictive. * There is only o

It's a bit deeper than just a series of bugs. For all of Linux's power and freedom, its modern desktop architecture is extremely restrictive. * There is only one systemd --user session per user with one D-Bus instance. So you can only have one desktop instance active at a time. * There is no way for privileged apps/scripts to generically control the desktop or other apps in Wayland. (so no accessibility, AI computer use or even general scripting) * There is no differentiation between configuration that should be active on (user, machine) tuple, and configuration that should be active on (user, *) tuple. (even Windows gets this right!) * Desktop apps do not report rich activity information so they cannot be smartly memory managed. * Desktop apps cannot generally be restored after getting killed/system shutdown. * No application identity, PIDs voluntarily take on application identities in Wayland and on D-Bus, but PIDs that don't can easily escape observability, and if they consume resources but not enough to show up high in top, good luck knowing about them.

rpdillon 11d ago
As technical as I am, none of those items really matter to me at all. So it's a great illustration of how the long tail of user needs is what ends up differentiating us in these discussions. It's very rare to get deep enough to actually identify that. I've always treated the desktop like a second-class citizen on Linux with the command line being my primary interface, and that has adapted so well to agentic usage that it never even occurred to me that desktop tool use was missing. Which is an interesting assertion by itself, since I have a local deep-seek model that routinely uses scripting to fire up servers, browsers, take screenshots, and assess how it's converging on a solution. I'm sure there's a long discussion to be had about how all of that is just a dirty hack, but for my purposes, it's been working excellently.

rpdillon 11d ago

As technical as I am, none of those items really matter to me at all. So it's a great illustration of how the long tail of user needs is what ends up differentiating us in these discussions. It's very rare to get deep enough to actually identify that. I've always treated the desktop like a second-class citizen on Linux with the command line being my primary interface, and that has adapted so well to agentic usage that it never even occurred to me that desktop tool use was missing. Which is an interesting assertion by itself, since I have a local deep-seek model that routinely uses scripting to fire up servers, browsers, take screenshots, and assess how it's converging on a solution. I'm sure there's a long discussion to be had about how all of that is just a dirty hack, but for my purposes, it's been working excellently.