[anton96]

And here we are, those are my two cents and my experience. I have used Linux for years, I liked the idea of defending something free and open.I absolutely love KDE and its personalization ability, it’s just exactly what I want.

Yet, I’m back on Windows, I like well defined screen, I have a 4K another one of lower resolution, to handle that well, I need Wayland, heck KDE just sometimes has less features or less solved bug on X11 now.

And at night I just want to watch one or two things before sleeping, I just need to turn my screen to my bed, and choose one the suggestions of plateforms like YouTube or Netflix with my mouse. …Yet, sometimes I like to type something, it’s usually short so I just use and on screen keyboard program which I’ve still wait to find one that works for Wayland.

This is so dum, it’s crazy to me that we used to fly away from all the dysfunctions of Windows to go the sane Linux ecosystem to only find that is starting to look a bit absurd on that side too. And we look at the discourse of Wayland devs, they speak exactly like corporate would do.

So that and few package management breakage and I think this is also a weak point of the ecosystem, tends to break, to upgrade everything when you only need one thing, too complex too trouble shoot.We usually think we have superior technological paleform on with Linux kernel, but package management is one of the weak point IMO.

All of that pushed me outside of Linux for now.When I encounter something that looks infuriating on Windows, I just think I might see something like this on Linux.

Edit: typos

[binkHN]

For work, Windows is not it for me anyone; it's a constant and distracting cesspool of ads for Microsoft services. In contrast, KDE wins here, by far, and not just because it's not distracting.

As for night time, I don't want or need my computer; I'll grab a tablet and consume all the content I want.

As for package management, let me know when I can type a single command on Windows and have my entire system and applications up-to-date.

[anton96]

I can only agree, Windows with its force restart, ads and little bugs and lags everywhere makes it a less suited plateform than Linux for word.

I can only lament that it’s kind of the opposite for personal usage.

[talldayo]

> Yet, sometimes I like to type something, it’s usually short so I just use and on screen keyboard program which I’ve still wait to find one that works for Wayland.

KDE Connect does: https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

You can turn your phone into a trackpad/remote keyboard, as long as your desktop is running the host software. Works just fine on Wayland, in my experience.

Overall I think people are right to blame Wayland for asking developers to reinvent the wheel, but wrong to defend the first-draft nature of x11. In a truly reductive sense, Linux never really had a desktop that worked. It was a desktop server that got hacked into usability by a lot of contributors, who ended up building a big unusable monolith. Naturally, a solution that is neither big nor monolithic is bound to make people angry.

But, I think we're past the point of lamenting x11's death. It was meant to be this way, Microsoft built Desktop Window Manager and Apple rolled out Quartz; sticking with x11 just didn't make competitive sense. Wayland's "big problem" is that it asks desktop developers to go the extra mile, and I don't really think that's a bad thing to ask. Linux didn't need taller, more fragile software stacks; it needs more thoughtful integration and actual diversity in implementation. It's not a coincidence that modern applications like the Steam Deck practically rely on Wayland to deliver such a customized experience.

[anton96]

Thanks for the tip, I’ve already used KDE connect even for iOS-Windows communication, it’s just great.

I think people resort back to X11 because it’s only think that worked for a broad sets of features.Sure we can have Wayland making progress but it seems there’s little resource targeted it, not even implementation but even standardizing some things and we’re 15 years past. Linux kernel itself was already at infamous 2.6 version by then.

Sure proprietary desktops have kind of shown the way. One side, it’s good to have standards clear/clean enough that it can be easily implemented, on the other side, it can just be especially resource taking to redevelop things that are the core difference of the desktop environnement you might be developing.

I can wonder and worry, if we would have and will still ever see something like compiz fusion, the diagonal screen tick seen this year or anything else. Design standards api, inter app communication and make it customizable is no way easy and I feel like Wayland has absolutely not find how to articulate all of those things.

[talldayo]

It's going to be a pain-point for a while. I invite you to look on the bright side, though; the past 10 years of Wayland was as bad as it will ever get. We live in wonderful times, where Nvidia/Wayland setups are actually stable; this is stuff people thought would never get fixed 10 years ago, but now we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. There's still work to do, but I think we're passing the point where Wayland has more features than it lacks.

x11 has a place in my heart, I loved many of it's apps (shoutouts to xsnow) and cherished the wildly bloated featureset. But damn, it was broken. MacOS had a pretty terrible compositor for a while, but once you booted up Quartz with double-buffer V-sync (imagine, back in 2005) you would already know x11 was finished. Wayland was the inevitably long-winded response from the Open Source community, and while it languished for a long time it's finally quite usable.

Nobody is going to stop you from using x11, or maintaining it yourself if it comes down to it. The philosophy of the matter is decided, though; smaller featuresets are more secure and easier to implement. Especially since the advent of smartphones, I feel like the idea of an x11-native desktop metaphor has been nonsense. Yes, the GNOME pundits push this point pretty extremely, but there's a kernel of truth to it. We really do need more flexible desktop architectures if we want Linux to be a commercial-quality product. x11 is holding it back.