Depends who “we” is but the more people you include, the more it trends to “no”.
LeFantome
joined 1 year ago
What an odd article. First, the author goes to great lengths to assert that “Linux IS UNIX” with pretty circumstantial evidence at best. Then, I guess to hide the fact the his point has not proved, he goes through the history of UNIX, I guess to re-enforce that Linux is just a small piece of the UNIX universe? Then, he chastises people working on Linux for not staying true to the UNIX philosophy and original design principles.
Questions like “are you sure this is a UNIX tool?” do not land with the weight he hopes as the answer os almost certainly “No. This is not a “UNIX” tool. It is not trying to be. Linux is not UNIX.”
The article seems to be mostly a complaint that Linux is not staying true enough to UNIX. The author does not really establish why that is a problem though.
There is an implication I guess that the point of POSIX and then we UNIX certification was to bring compatibility to the universe of diverging and incompatible Unices. While I agree that fragmentation works against commercial success, this is not a very strong point. Not only was the UNIX universe ( with its coherent design philosophy and open specifications ) completely dominated by Windows in the market but they were also completely displaced by Linux ( without the UNIX certification ).
Big companies found in Linux a platform that they could collaborate on. In practice, Linux is less fragmented and more ubiquitous than UNiX ever was before Linux. Critically, Linux has been able to evolve beyond the UNIX certification.
Linux does follow standards. There is POSIX of course. There is the LSB. There is freedesktop.org. There are others. There is also only one kernel.
Linux remains too fragmented on the desktop to displace Windows. To address that, a standard set of Linux standards are emerging: including Wayland, pipewire, and Flatpak.
Wayland is an evolution of the Linux desktop. It is a standard. There is a specification. There is a lot of collaboration around its evolution.
As for “other” systems, I would argue that compatibility with Linux will be more useful to them than compatibility with “UNIX”. I would expect other systems to adopt Wayland in time. It is already supported on systems like Haiku. FreeBSD is working on it as well.
Thank you for the response and explanation.
In my view, it would be better to say on the GitHub page that Louvre lacks support for “XWayland Rootless Mode” or “supports XWayland only in rootful mode” rather than lacking support for XWayland completely.
From reading of the GitHub page, my understanding was that XWayland would not work at all. This made the idea of using Louvre at this point sound totally impractical and positioned it as purely a toy in my mind. It also made me question technically why it would not work. I was already familiar with the idea of rootful vs rootless mode but it would never have occurred to me that this is what you meant.
When I read the new release notes I asked myself “how can XWayland not be a top priority?” but your explanation makes perfect sense. I can completely respect focussing on making Louvre as a fully capable Wayland compositor first before worrying about deeper X11 integration. Rootful mode may be less elegant but at least needing to use an X application is no longer a show-stopper.
I think I saw in a roadmap that XWayland support was prioritized as “hopefully never” which made it seem like a purposeful, ideological boycott. With your explanation here, that also makes a lot more sense and comes across as less off-putting and perhaps just more optimistic for how quickly pure Wayland will suffice. I don’t imagine you would block merging the contribution if somebody else did the X11 work.
You can even get RISC-V ITX boards now.
Justin
Wait. It is MIT licensed now? Ok. Now I am totally excited. I will be starting a project based on this immediately.
Still no XWayland support?
I agree that the Xf in Xfce ( originally XFCE ) stands for XForms ( or did originally ). You do not think that the X in XForms stands for X11 though?
XForms is a port of the Forms library ( originally a GL based SGI toolkit ) to X11. I do not know for sure but it seems pretty obvious that the X in XForms stands for X11.
Once we all move to Wayland, the Xfce name will carry quite a bit of history in its name. I kind of like that.
Me too. I could use another Wayland compositor and be pretty happy. On my iMac, I have been running Metacity as a WM because xf4wm had some kind of memory leak. Most of the “apps”, including Thunar, already run on Wayland as well I believe.
They are clearly still polishing / stabilizing the recent 9 release which was quite feature packed. Nice to see actually.
Is KYC a thing outside finance?
This is really interesting and great news. I use VirtManager and Boxes but find VirtualBox to be easier to use and configure.
Commercially, there are sometimes VirtualBox images available that cannot be used with QEMU. I think even Microsoft makes “test” instances of Windows available as VB images.
VirtualBox is cross platform. I teach sometimes and, while I am using Linux, most of the students use Windows or macOS. It is easier to create instructions and give demos that use VirualBox. This announcement will be great for me.
Ya, I am not going to trust anything coming out of a post that cites that numbers for install size. As others have said, even the Windows one is bonkers.
As an EOS user myself, I love the conclusion but have no faith at all in the methodology.
If you want an article to make Linux look good, a test of the new Damn Small Linux would be interesting. It fits a basic version of practically every program you need into a 700 MB system. It also includes the APT package manager and full access to the Debian 12 stable repos so you can easily add anything you want on top of that.
It would be interesting to know what footprint it would require to run the “tests” he runs here.