[lillecarl]

Gnome vs KDE isn't really a thing, deb vs rpm isn't a thing, X vs Wayland is only a temporary thing, Pulse vs PipeWire isn't a thing, PipeWire implements pulse apis.

systemd vs $INITSYSTEM is also temporary, though on a longer timescale. We need the old generation to die before systemd is accepted by everyone.

I don't mean to shit on your argument, but most things are either just preferences or progress that isn't done yet.

I'm about as bleeding-edge as can be (always latest stable kernel with xanmod patches) from NixOS, using Wayland and PipeWire.

The move to PipeWire made literally everything better for me (just works TM). While Wayland isn't perfect yet.

Gnome or KDE is a preference, it doesn't matter much and they're cooperating on many Wayland extensions.

systemd hate is either because you love the drama or you like bash scripts.

I don't particularly like either, so I like systemd.

A good thing people often forget with Wayland, PipeWire and systemd is that they are making our ecosystem a bit less fragmented, which I see as a great win, especially since I'm a NixOS user, my system relies heavily on systemd being declarative. My distro of choice wouldn't work as well (at all) without all "standards" (both real and implementation) that systemd and freedesktop puts forward.

Back on topic, the Linux desktop is honestly quite great if you constrain yourself a bit (Run a stable distro with boring tech, no Nvidia) or live on the bleeding edge where things also work well but might require more maintenance.

Lets be honest though, if I wasn't running NixOS I would probably run Ubuntu with whatever display and audio server they decided for me. And the package manager would be apt, brew, nix or flatpak depending on application. (Now it's Nix and Flatpak only).

[abrouwers]

Fair points, though I don't share your enthusiasm about wayland/pipewire transitions being "temporary." The fragmentation that Wayland has caused will be difficult to recover from - I think many older WM's will just die off. I generally agree that less fragmentation is good, though, so hopeful that desktop linux emerges stronger. But, having used it full time for the last ~15 years, it feels less focused than ever. Perhaps I too should transition to something like ubuntu, and just not worry about any of it :D

[harry8]

>Perhaps I too should transition to something like ubuntu, and just not worry about any of it :D

Something like this (fedora, debian are fine, I've heard arch is fine, no doubt others also) is the /only/ fair approach in comparison it to an apple or windows laptop. It's the only approach _possible_ with microsoft & apple.

Doing fun stuff like re-writing the default kernel scheduler and putting a bug in there on linux is really just not a point against linux in any way when you can (a) choose not to do that and (b) can't choose that at all with windows. Apple? Does anyone compile their own laptop kernel on apple? Common enough on linux because you can make your use as complicated as suits you in all the ways you can't on windows and apple...

It is true that apple sysadmin gets super complicated and hard with the answer usually boiling down to something not far away from: "you can't do what you want even if it used to work fine and you paid apple for the privilege. But you can pay apple an ever bigger subscription to do something related the way they want and stop complaining, apple is so user-friendly! Apple knows best. Freedom is tyranny."

I mourn the death of the Nokia N900. I hope for the oncoming pine phone & pine time revolution because Apple really are every bit as foul as Google. These things aren't yet easy the way laptops really are now.

[lillecarl]

I'm on NixOS atm, but I've been considering going Ansible+btrfs on some rolling release distro instead, the declarative approach is cool but hard when you're off the beaten path!

For PipeWire I'd say we're already there, it just works better than pulse when doing pulse things, and they also implement JACK and ALSA if you need them.

Regarding Wayland, yes a lot of old DE's and WM's will die, but that's just the way of nature, there are still many great options for people to use, we must deprecate things eventually.

Wayland impressions so far: Annoying that windows can't take focus, annoying that electron doesn't default to it yet, TouchPad input works better, scaling works better. Some apps (vscode) shows a generic icon in Wayland rather than vscode.

Remember that you can run XWayland on Wayland. XWayland will keep most X11 apps working just the same, and X11 really needs depreciation. I'm almost most excited about "Waypipe". When it's mature enough it'll run circles around X11 forwarding while being performant and secure!

I mean I realize how I've turned into one of those "you just have to do these easy things to make it work" kind of people, but for "dumb usersč on "good hardware" (Linux compatible) it's really quite nice, my father had less issues on Linux Mint than Windows.

The year of the Linux desktop is here, it's just wrapped into a VM (crosvm) or a gaming console (SteamDeck/SteamOS).

Honestly with a bit more customization options, and no tracking I would probably get a Chromebook as the next machine (They run Android and "Linux" apps now)

With Waydroid or Anbox you can run Android apps on Linux too, but last I tried wasn't great.

Progress is being made on the shittiest of fronts too! NVIDIA moving code from the driver into firmware is "great" from a usability perspective, I don't really care enough about FLOSS to demand my GPU implementation details being open, as long as compatibility is good.