LeFantome

As somebody that first configured X back in 1991, I agree with this message.

To be fair though, with KMS, libdrm, and libinput, setting up X is 1000 times easier than it used to be. I suspect most users never even need to open Xorg.conf or even know it exists.

Ironically, all these technologies are also used by Wayland. A lot of what Wayland does not do, Xorg basically does not do either.

Most applications get their Wayland support from the toolkit they are written in. Qt ( KDE ) and GTK ( GNOME ) apps are going to work in any Wayland compositor.

Some applications do “desktop” related things like try to take screenshots to set global hot keys. Wayland, strictly speaking, does not allow this. This becomes the job of the “compositor” ( Window Manager ) and so, if an application wants to do those things, it has to know how to talk to the compositor.

Increasingly, the desktop environments and compositors are aligning on how to surface some of these capabilities to applications in a common way.

You said “I learn” twice in a sentence that demonstrates what you do not know. Impressive.

I don’t know that I would say that Wayland is not based on X11. It is a rewrite, not a fork but it is the next chapter of a common history.

Wayland and Xorg do share a lot of code in a way. Libraries like libinput, libdrm, KMS, and Mesa are used by both.

I think the drama around Wayland can be explained by the sentence “it should be a drop-in replacement like pipewire but isn’t”.

Without taking a side on that issue, I will point out that this was not a goal for the Wayland designers ( in their own words - I do not have time to go find a quote but have read this sentiment many times ). Wayland detractors agree with your sentence and, given that expectation, are legitimately upset and even confused that Wayland continues to gain mind and market share against X11.

If you feel that Wayland needs to be a drop-in replacement for X11, it is not ready and may never be. By that metric, some people see Wayland as a failed technology and perceive Wayland users as shills and zealots.

If you are interested in a display server that addresses some of the core design problems in X11 and do not mind moving to something new, Wayland is starting to look ready for prime-time.

If you are non-technical and / or unopinionated the debate is probably irrelevant. Wayland will most likely become the default on whatever Linux distribution you use sometime in 2024 or 2025. You will be a Wayland user. Maybe you already are.

If you are willing to step outside the mainstream, using X11 without Wayland is going to be possible for at least another decade. That said, I am saying “outside the mainstream” because not only will popular Linux distributions and desktop environments start to become Wayland only but the innovation is all going to move to Wayland. There will be many Wayland-only compositors, apps, and features. 5 years from now, not using Wayland is going to really limit the desktop experience. I expect some toolkits ( GTK, Qt, and maybe even WINE ) to drop X11 support at some point ( maybe not soon but sooner than 10 years maybe ). 5 - 10 years may seem like a long time but it will likely come faster than X11 stalwarts expect.

Do it

I know this is a joke comment but Linux is for sure an enterprise kernel first and foremost. It did not start that way but that is how it has been developed and managed for many years now. Maybe the most incorrect thing anybody has ever said on record in the computer industry is when Linus said Linux was “not going to be anything big and professional”.

Linux distributions, which are conceived and managed totally independently from the kernel are available for every niche. Many of them are desktop and “consumer” oriented. With many Linux distributions, I would say that it is more accurate that they are hobbiest oriented more than what Microsoft would mean be “consumer”.

Some of us used Windows NT 3.1, celebrated when 3.5 came out and actually worked, and when 4.0 came out we cringed because Windows NT 3.51 had finally gotten it right and 4.0 looked like it was going to cause problems with its Windows 95 inspired UI.

Turns out Windows NT 4.0 was actually pretty good ( especially on DEC Alpha ).

There is absolutely no doubt though that Windows 2000 Professional is the best product Microsoft ever released. If it ran 64 bit apps, I might still be running it today.

By the way, did you know that the Windows NT Resource Kit shipped with the GNU C compiler?

Well thought out post and largely true.

As a small counterpoint, I am supposed to use Windows at work but I use Linux. I would say that I am a “very heavy” but intermediate Microsoft Office user. That is, while I am not expert level in Office, I have to create and consume multiple documents per day. I give ( or submit ) several PowerPoints per week. These typically use templates supplied by Marketing or others. I create and consume multiple Excel files daily which almost always have multiple worksheets. I must admit that I have gotten authoring Word files down to maybe one per week but I open 3 a day at least.

Of course, I do not actually use Microsoft Office most of the time. Most of the above is in LibreOffice. I spend a tonne of my day in Outlook which I use in a browser ( Office 365 ). If I am opening a document from an email, it will often open in Office 365 online ( in my browser in Linux ). So do I use Microsoft Office quite a bit but rarely author anything there. While I prefer Firefox, I use Microsoft Edge on Linux and most often that is where I have Outlook open. Sadly, I have at least 3 to 4 Microsoft Teams meetings a day. Teams and GoToMeeting are why I started using Edge. It is just a nicer workflow if Teams and Outlook are in the same browser.

Anyway, I have very little problem exchanging documents. I had to switch to default fonts that Windows users will have of course but that was long ago now. So, I would not say that “alternatives such as LibreOffice aren’t just good enough” is a fair assessment for everybody. If I was an expert user in any one app ( in Finance maybe ) I could see this being true but I bet most office workers could use LibreOffice just fine these days.

Outside of Office, most of what I use are web applications which work just as well on Linux. I use containers a lot and they work better on Linux. Linux is quite bit snappier on the same hardware.

I am just a datapoint though and the issues you raise are real. I would perhaps just be less absolute about it. Trying Linux can still make sense. Also, you can try LibreOffice on Windows before jumping all the way to Linux.

In that talk he called C “the worst language” and said he chose it to troll the industry. How does that support your point?

He also said that you should choose “least privilege” whenever possible. That is precisely the value that Rust brings over C. So how does that talk support the idea that C is more secure than Rust?

This may be a controversial opinion but I would rather use the web version of Outlook than Evolution. I have been trying to use Evolution since the Ximian days but I was never really happy with it. I gave up on it in favour of web Outlook a couple of years ago.

Please, don’t use Open Office. Dev essentially halted on it years ago when it was forked o LibreOffice. Use LibreOffice instead. The Open Office project seems to still exist to trick people into using old software.