[ElijahLynn]

Gonna say that the switch from X11 to Wayland that was pretty much forced this year across many distributions, broke a ton of things too (screenshot programs, keyboard shortcuts), however, all the code is open source, and there are workarounds and source code available but it still sucks.

Basic keyboard shortcuts are still broke with the Wayland migration. e.g. Copyq has this janky workaround for a shortcut to register with the xdg-portal (that works until reboot, then stops), Warp terminal claims there is no support, Flameshot was impossible to configure, have to use the built in Gnome shortcut tool now. The whole ecosystem got wrecked. I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now.

[hedora]

I do all my gaming and LLM inference on devuan. (That laptop should chew through 30-120B parameter LLMs, depending on how much RAM it has.)

I don't have any of the problems mentioned by you or sibling comments, full stop.

Up until about a year ago, audio was janky as hell, but then as part of the great de-Poettering, they switched from PulseAudio to PipeWire. I've had zero issues since then.

Copy paste works. Login works. X11 runs at native panel speed (144Hz) with bug-for-bug parity with windows 3d acceleration, but open source (AMD drivers). XScreenSaver works (and can lock the screen). I can't comment on any of the stuff you mention in the second paragraph. I assume it's a bunch of broken Wayland workarounds?

Anyway, instead of switching to Mac, just switch to a stable distribution. Devuan is Debian minus systemd, so essentially everything works out of the box. Even crap that requires systemd usually works, since they install stubs. LLMs like Claude will happily admin it once you tell it that which init system to target.

[dotancohen]

  > the great de-Poettering

If I remember correctly, Devuan uses sysv, yes? Other than Pulse Audio, what other Poettering software is in normal Debian?

[TacticalCoder]

> ... what other Poettering software is in normal Debian?

A rube-goldberg version of SSH that somehow depends on many things that should be totally unrelated to SSH. Because ofc Poettering needing to mess with everything does need to have systemd notifications available from SSH.

This excuse allows to link many libs and pretend the backdoor attempts are unrelated to systemd, like the liblzma one.

Not of course it's an excuse that doesn't run very far seen the following undisputable fact: the XZ backdoor only affect systemd-enabled SSH. Ouch. Facts do hurt.

I cannot wait for the day a good hypervisor comes out for Linux that runs perfectly on a systemd-less Linux distro, like Devuan (I already used Devuan, but not as an hypervisor).

Basically "Proxmox but systemd-free". I know I've got the FreeBSD+bhyve option too. And at long last I'll be systemd-free again.

[hedora]

Also, a DNS client and NTP reimplementation that have both had security bugs, the broken replacement for syslogd, etc.

After a while, I just lost track. Happily, I don't have to deal with any of that stuff these days.

I'd expect devuan to be a decent hypervisor host, but haven't tried. There's also SmartOS (a few forks away from being Solaris), which looks like it had a release this year. It includes native ZFS.

Honestly, at this point, I'm looking at devuan as the last stop before I jump on the FreeBSD train. It looks like they let you choose between X11 or Wayland, at least for now. I got Steam to work in a FreeBSD VM, but it face-planted because the VM host didn't support any sort of 3d acceleration.

Hopefully enough users will revolt to keep X11, systemd-free Linux viable, but I wonder if that particular niche (which still works great out of the box) is going to end up less popular than the BSDs.

[hedora]

Well, systemd, including logind, which was incredibly unstable for me under manjaro (basic session management was flaky).

Devuan uses elogind, which is a fork of logind that doesn't require systemd. I haven't noticed any problems with it.

[dotancohen]

Systemd is the big one obviously, that's why I mentioned sysv. I'd never heard of logind, so I thought it was sysv.

[hedora]

logind partially replaces things like xdm.

My machine has elogind and slim running (devuan default behavior), and from what I can tell this gives you the same functionality as xdm used to, but worse.

I'm not sure why things got split into two subsystems, but I guess logind is essentially required in systemd systems. I remember there were a bunch of bugs where systemd would do stuff like unexpectedly force-kill background processes, and rm -rf home directories, etc, etc.

I think those bugs had something to do with logind, but I'm not sure.

Again, I just see weird vestigial stubs on my machine, not the underlying multi-decade train wreck.

[mrbuttons454]

It's the 128gb variant, and I chose it for that reason exactly. I can dedicate up to 96gb to the iGPU

[hedora]

You can probably just dedicate 1GB for the framebuffer, and then let Linux dynamically allocate memory to it at runtime. As far as I can tell this doesn't impact performance, so there's no downside. (Older AMD stacks required a static partitioning under Linux, I think).

[mrbuttons454]

I haven’t had much time with it, but I’ve had to set the split in the BIOS. There’s probably a way to do it from within Linux though. Also hoping some progress is made on using the AMD NPU in Linux. I know it only recently got kernel level support.

[hedora]

I thought I had to split it in the BIOS, but then I just didn't (this is on a 2025 machine), and llama ended up with the same available "GPU" ram either way (confirmed by running inference on it).

[mrbuttons454]

Oh that's fantastic, I'll give it a try. thank you!

[pstuart]

Finally there's good news for Linux users: https://github.com/FastFlowLM/FastFlowLM

[mrbuttons454]

Amazing, thank you!

[chongli]

I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now.

It really makes me miss Classic Mac OS 9. I used it from 7.5.1 to 9.2.2. I remember being so excited about Mac OS X when the Public Beta came out that I switched immediately. It really sucked and I went back immediately. But eventually Mac OS X got better and I switched to it, and never looked back.

Now I am looking back and remembering everything I lost. A computer that was so simple and so predictable. It didn't change behind my back all the time. It never shoved upgrades down my throat. It just worked!

[herdymerzbow]

"A computer that was so simple and so predictable."

This is what cachyOS + KDE is giving me at the moment. Ok, so it's not totally simple and there are A LOT of updates. But it's by and large predictable. I never had a 1980-90s Mac, but I had an Apple IIe and an Amiga 500. While cachyOS is so much more powerful it doesn't abuse that power like Windows and OSX with so many background processes and telemetry. I have a Mac laptop and I dual boot my PC with Windows + Linux. I don't have hate OSX but CachyOS + KDE is by far my favourite as it's customisable to the extent I want and it just gets out of my way. Highly recommend it if that wasn't obvious!

[chongli]

If you've lived in your house/apartment for a good long while and settled in, you have an idea of what it was like to use Classic Mac OS 9 (and earlier).

It's like flicking a lightswitch or reaching into a drawer and grabbing a spoon without looking. Everything is always right where you left it. Double-click a folder and the window opens in exactly the same state that you left it when it was last closed. All the icons are arranged in the same way, with the same label colours you gave them, and each of the folders inside that folder open the same way as well. One folder might open in list view sorted by Date Modified while another opens in icon view with the exact arrangement you decided on, all according to the way you left them.

All of those folders open their windows in the exact same position, size, and shape they had when you closed them. This lets you quickly drill down through layers of nested folders, moving your mouse to the next one before your eyes can even register it on screen.

The effect of this extreme level of persistence is that you develop muscle memory for the mouse. No other operating system environment I have ever used works like this, or at least this pervasively (modern macOS still has this for the menu bar). Everyone else just gives up and relegates the muscle-memory control to the keyboard only. This is a huge tragedy! A Classic Mac OS power user works with one hand on the mouse, one hand on the keyboard, and uses muscle memory with both to fly around the UI and work very efficiently. This is especially valuable when you're working in software that needs the mouse anyway, such as art or design software.

[hedora]

There was a lot of research leading up to 1980's-1990's UI design showing that people have a good understanding of physical persistence and the ability to remember where stuff is. This is why you can walk to your favorite restaurant or find your car after parking it.

Most modern UIs actively break spatial locality, so they don't work well for human users.

Imagine a parking lot that continuously shuffles the locations of all the cars, but you have a clicker that can make your car's alarm go off. You can walk towards it, and, although it might move while you're headed towards it, it is generally moving slower than you, so eventually you can find it.

This is kind of how Amazon warehouses work, and has the advantage that it can scale to infinite inventories and load balance access patterns really well (especially for robot pick + placers).

It also famously burns out human workers.

Note that the article spends a long time complaining about spotlight bugs. This is because there's no way to find anything on a modern version of MacOS. Logical directories (like Applications, Downloads, Documents and Desktop) are split into multiple physical unix directories. Photos aren't even stored in a directory at all!

The transition from OS9/Win 3.x to OSX/modern Windows is like moving from the house you grew up in to squatting in a never ending series of shopping malls and being forced to move on every few hours or so.

[OtomotO]

I've been exclusively on wayland (xwayland for games and browsers before they support/ed wayland natively) since 2019 (!)

Yes, there were and are problems, but far, far less than before and not much more than on X11, just different ones.

[linmob]

+1 - switched to Sway (and thus Wayland) in 2017 and it was okay then to only improve over time. At some point I switched xwayland off, as there were env vars to make everyhing I needed run natively on Wayland.

These days my setup is less radical/minimalistic, as I went back to GNOME (Wayland) about four years ago.

[badsectoracula]

FWIW exactly because it is open source, there isn't anyone actually forcing you to use Wayland (distros changed a default, they didn't remove the ability to install something else - even Fedora that got rid of X11 support for GNOME in their distro still provides other DEs and WMs). As long as there are people who want to keep using X11, there will be an option (be it Xorg or some fork).

[benoau]

It's been a very frustrating year, I made the mistake of upgrading Pop OS 22.04 that I'd been using for years that was a rough couple of weeks!

Toshy still works to give me Mac keyboard shortcuts I might never let go of, but I still haven't figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between open instances of the same program which drives me insane!

[mrbuttons454]

Keyboard shortcuts have been a big pain point, but I'm adjusting. I'm using Plasma 6, and trying to use the defaults vs emulating the mac shortcuts. Print screen as a screenshot button makes considerably more sense to me than Command-Shift-4, and Meta+Print Screen captures just a single window.

Logiops + Plasma's multi desktop support has given me something very similar to the multi desktop experience I had before, and the pager in the taskbar is a big improvement.

The tiling in Plasma needs work. I initially loved it until I released that when I arranged the tiles differently on one desktop, it changed them on the others... Hopefully that gets better.

[kelvinjps10]

Hyprland it's doing a lot of efforts in solving these problems. For now I'm using i3 and will come back one the ecosystem stabilizes more. (More than that I've lazy bc from what I've seen now is ready)

[rounce]

> Hyprland it's doing a lot of efforts in solving these problems

Is it? Do you have any examples?

[lioeters]

> been considering switching TO the mac

As a previous Mac(intosh) user of many years, before you switch back, I'd recommend trying Pop OS and its new COSMIC desktop env based on Wayland. It's still has some rough edges, not as polished as macOS was, but free from Apple's enshittification, and free in terms of open source. It's everything I wished Macintosh would have matured into, but that ship has sailed years ago.

Some people run NixOS with COSMIC DE, I'm considering that for my next machine. Also, Pop OS is based on Ubuntu, which you might also try. I've installed it for several non-technical friends and family, and they haven't had a single issue with it, migrating from Windows or Mac.

[freetonik]

Another alternative is ElementaryOS, with its desktop environment resembling macOS.