Sure they support both X11 and Wayland for NOW.

KDE soon won't, and that's the one we use.

Gnome I got no clue, we don't use Gnome.

Cinnamon is likely to be alright and supporting X for a good while.

Also like... "but that's not STANDARD!" is literally my entire point. That's the problem. "That's not a standard use case" being used as basically a "go fuck yourself, you don't matter". (You might not be implying this, but a lot of people sure do.)

Linux should support the weird stuff too. "That's not a standard use case" could be used to reject just about anything you don't like, even, say, custom fonts.

Wait, since when did X11 have a screen tearing problem?

Like yeah, if you're not running a compositor you're gonna get screen tearing unless you turn on TearFree, but a) hey native triple buffered everything! (except on Nvidia because Nvidia doesn't care) and b) all of that is moot if you do run a compositor. That said KWin on X11 has frame pacing issues so disabling its compositing to play games is a good idea. You don't have to do that on Wayland. Also c) games can totally do vsync themselves, can't they?

At least you CAN do xorg.conf stuff. With Wayland, if your DE doesn't provide you a scroll speed slider you're just fucked.

And about "security"... sure, if malicious apps on your system are even part of your threat model in the first place. It makes sense for phones. On desktop though, most malicious stuff is probably confined to your web browser anyway. I'd rather have working copy-paste and window control scripting and suchlike.

Except it's not an option if we want to use our normal DE.

(Also, CRT monitors are normal monitors. And they're actually pretty great. OLED-level blacks, even! Just gotta watch your refresh rate, 60 Hz flickers like crazy if you use a light theme. 70 is fine for us.)

On par with X11? Have you tried to do anything even slightly "weird"?

It's not on par with X11 and probably never will be, because the Wayland people just go "that's out of scope! beg your DE to implement it!" for EVERYTHING.

KDE only VERY recently got the ability to do custom resolutions, which are absolutely critical if you have a CRT monitor, like one release before they're going to drop X11 completely. I think a few smaller compositors also have a protocol for that, but like, Gnome? Good fucking luck. They HATE features and probably love the fact that they can just refuse to implement basic stuff and leave you with no way to work around them at the X level.

Our vim clipboard support still doesn't work. It's supposed to work (vim says it supports wayland). Guess what, it doesn't.

wl-copy/paste needs to OPEN A WINDOW and take focus to get the clipboard (for... Reasons™... "but SECURITY!"...) and KDE's focus stealing prevention blocked it from taking focus, meaning it would just hang forever until we added a window rule for it.

We still, as far as I know, have no way to disable our PS4 controller's trackpad from working as a trackpad, without affecting the ability to use it in steam input, without affecting other trackpads on the system if there are any. Because "that's weird, who would want that?" and nobody thought to build the tooling to let you do that.

I'm sorry no, that's not a functioning replacement for X11. People SAY it is. That doesn't make it true.

-- Frost

16GB of RAM, 16GB of swap, and we often fill up both. So many browser tabs. Soooo many browser tabs.

Oh absolutely, 100%.

Have you seen all the people going "Wayland is THE FUTURE!! Get with the times! What do you mean it doesn't work? What do you mean that's by design? Shut up, stop impeding PROGRESS!"? Those people.

If you haven't seen them, yeah, they're a thing.

Could be because of how hard Rust is being pushed.

Just like how Wayland is being pushed. And systemd is being pushed.

Alternatives to the Hotness™ are good. Programming language diversity is good.

Is C good? Well, it's good at being simple to compile and at being low-level, but beyond that, nah not really. But is it better than Rust? IMO yeah. (But more for cultural reasons than for technical ones.)

Most coreutils stuff could honestly probably do really well written in Perl, too, with how string-processing-focused they are. String processing is like Perl's whole schtick. Where's our Perl coreutils implementation then!

-- Frost

By "shipped with the kernel", do you mean by the kernel people? Or just by distros?

Because I don't think the kernel people ship anything proprietary. Distros do, because distros are in the business of actually putting together a functional operating system, but that doesn't make the kernel nonfree any more than some distros shipping Steam by default makes the kernel nonfree. (Personally I like that our distro of choice doesn't ship Steam preinstalled, but I like having nonfree wifi firmware on the install disc because it's really hard to get wifi drivers when you don't have working wifi.)

-- Frost

No, that sounds gross.

The current software works well enough, and even if it doesn't, there's plenty of weird niche software written by queer furry critters.

-- Frost

To expand on this, for Linux, most of the drivers are actually open source!

For the other stuff, there are "kernel modules", that the kernel loads and runs in kernel space (just like how user programs can load libraries to do stuff). So they're part of the kernel in that sense, but not necessarily open source. But that doesn't mean the kernel isn't open source at all, just that it might, optionally, be running other code that's proprietary.

(Most kernel modules are open source, too. It's only a few weird ones like Nvidia's proprietary driver that aren't.)

And Mac.

Hell, Mac even capitalizes /Users (where home folders are)!

-- Frost

Look, is this some kind of coordinated harassment campaign? It's feeling like it.

Can't we all just take a step back and breathe?

-- Frost