Niche X11 projects die, niche wayland projects emerge... Nothing's really gonna change here. And packages SHOULD be unified. There is no response reason to package chromium in 15 different ways for every distro.
The several distros is a thing of sheer beauty. It's like the meritocratic free market -- everyone can participate and the only way to win is to make something better than anyone else.
but why? It makes software installation easy. You constantly angry nerds are a huge part of the reason Linux doesn't have more popularity. There's literally nothing wrong with flatpaks for the average user
Total centralization of the Linux Eco system isn't good for anyone. But total fragmentation where there's a million different distros that can all do basically the same thing isn't good either.
Wayland and Flatpak are great projects though. Love seeing them get more adoption.
I mean, they're never gonna be finished if people don't migrate to them and work on them. A lot of the wayland issues like "wayland breaks X" is because of the devs of said app rather than wayland itself. Kinda like adobe products and Linux, it ain't linux that's breaking them.
Yeah this thread is full of people expecting the new thing to immediately surpass the old, ignoring the decades of development and refinement that went into the old solution.
I get that, I really do, but don't try and push a product that isn't usable for everyone to everyone. Sure, whoever wants to use it, they can, report bugs, open PRs, whatever, but don't push this thing like it's the second comming to everyone out there. One, not everyone needs the features it has, X11 works fine for most people. Two, it's not backwards compatible, meaning they'd have to abandon a lot of software that just doesn't work with it (waypipe doesn't work all the time and with every piece of software there is).
The transition is rushed, everyone feels that. Why? Because a lot of new features that new hardware had couldn't be implemented in X11. And let's be honest, this rushing to switch to Wayland is mostly because of gamers. Regarding a lot of things Linux related, they are the de facto standard that dictates whether somethings get's changed or upgraded. I'm sorry, but not everyone is a gamer. Most people just need a working PC to do whatever. If you can't be backwards compatible completely with the old UIs, I'm sorry, but that's a deal breaker for me and I believe most regular users.
Xwayland is a thing, and nobody stops you from installing Xorg if you wanted. They're just dropping official support so they can focus that energy to Wayland instead.
Also not all Xorg features should be ported.
I have found Wayland will work for 99% of users who aren't gamers, all the major programs work well, ironically Wayland has been worse for gaming so far for me on the underpowered laptop, but that's due to it having to run also through xwayland, which will be a problem solved by Valve pretty soon as they don't have to worry about Xorg anymore and can make proton work better for Wayland.
do you really expect people, who do this work in their free time out of the goodness of their heart, to release fully finished products that are supposed to work 100% flawlessly right from the get-go? maybe FOSS isn't the right space for you then.
There are projects that beg to differ. PipeWire, a perfect example. The author thought it wasn't stable enough even though some distros addopted it as default. He switched to version 1.0 a few months ago.
And I do also use non-FOSS software. I use whatever I like, I don't discriminate, FOSS or not. Sure, it'd be great if every piece of software was open source, but hey, things are what they are 🤷. DaVinci Resolve is closed source, but there are a lot of things NLE video editors can learn from it.
People complaining about something opensource not doing what they want it to do: dudes/dudettes, if you want to maintain X11, go right ahead. Or if you want it maintained, pay somebody to do it. But stop this incessant whining about opensource devs choosing a direction you don't like and pretending it's the end of the world. This isn't some faceless, megacorp with closed-source shit you have no control over.
If all the people complaining about wayland either put their energy to positive stuff like making wayland better or making X11 better, this wouldn't be a problem.
Counterpoint, if all of the people advocating for wayland actually worked on improving wayland to a usable state instead maybe people would actually want to use it.
No one's forcing you to use it. If you don't want to, stick to X11. I've been testing wayland for a few months now and it's fine. It does most of I want it to. I don't need fancy fractional scaling, adaptive refresh rates, or whatever other fancy stuff people complain about that isn't there. It shows my windows, allows screen-share, and... that's it. Only thing missing for me is scriptability.
I'm not advocating for Wayland nor X11, just saying to stop shitting on devs who give a lot of free time to write opensource code that none of us have to pay for. All we have to do is be nice - maybe report bugs, maybe maybe donate if we have the means.
My pet peeve is when people complain someone else's free labor isn't being done in the way they'd prefer. First of all, it's entitled. Secondly, complaining on social media rarely if ever accomplishes anything in FOSS land.
X11 is already dead, and it will not become more or less usable it will always stay the way it's and wayland will get better. that's the difference and flatpak is just an option it doesn't try to replace what's already availible. spreading distrust and misinformation about these softwares doesn't help
How do you mean that? I've been using X11 for like 17 years. i3 uses X11, and I will most likely not use another WM if I can help it. It's perfect for me. X11 is available in the core repositories of all the big distros.
Just because they don't do full releases doesn't mean it isn't developed anymore. They switched to updating modules individually, with three updates made this month. Doesn't sound very abandoned to me.
Well that’s confusing because the meme is complaint text with Hulk saying that he sees this as an absolute win and you titled the post “I don’t” which means you don’t see this as absolute win and therefore agree with complaint text in the image.
Killing is overly dramatic, but it's putting a burden on certain projects if they want to convert to it and not all have the resources to tank it. I don't see Window Maker porting their toolkit to Wayland, for instance.
But XWayland exists so I don't see what's the fuss.
Flatpak is good for diversity. Users don't need to worry about whether the obscure distro they want to use has the software they want in its repos. If a distro supports flatpak it will work with most popular software out of the box.
I may be misunderstanding flatpack, though I do understand the draw of all dependencies in one package.
One of the big things that drew me to linux some years ago was "oh, you don't have to reinstall every dependency 101 times in a packaged exe so the system stays much smaller?" As well as in-place updates without a restart. It resulted in things being much much less bloated, or maybe that was just placebo.
Linux seems to be going in the flatpack direction which seems to just be turning it into a windows-like system. That and nix-like systems where everything is containerized and restarting is the only thing that applies updates seems to be negating those two big benefits.
Flatpak doesn't conform to the XDG home directory, and that upsets me. Also we have an ongoing dispute between SI and IEC units on their GitHub. But I like it otherwise.
