[foul]

"On Linux under Wayland" is a big part of the problem. On X11 a significant part of missing "GUI-exposed-as-api" is present. If we concede (and I think otherwise) that we need a FOSS operating system and desktop experience to be fully on par with competitors and offer agentic-first options, I think that an open-minded developer (or one that can afford to run a fairly good LLM on local machine), presented with the problem, can see evidently that said roadblock doesn't exist: X11 can stop being a maze, or thousands of Wayland apps can be forked to make them expose an API, the FUSE filesystem kind of API.

I don't care much about agents though, I sure see as potentially useful some desktop assistant, and that is that.

[kps]

Wayland is a major regression for accessibility. People have been raising that for years, but always shouted down by the brigade with the motte-and-bailey seesaw between “Wayland replaces X11” and “Wayland is just a protocol”.

[doublerabbit]

There's too much splintering in the community now and the incentive drawbridge for FOSS feels like it's closing. Many of the older maintainers who carried projects for decades are starting to step away due to age, burnout, or simple exhaustion.

It feels nowadays that if someone genuinely puts the effort into untangling a codebase, fixing the long-standing issues and navigating the maze of legacy paths, the backlash and politics around it leaves the project deflated and unappreciated. The reaction around Xlibre shows how hostile these situations can become. Personally, I still prefer Xorg in many ways, even if Wayland is technically the newer direction.

FOSS was a powerful ideological concept in the 90s when most software was proprietary and corporate-controlled. The 2000s felt like real growth and experimentation. Today, a lot of it feels fragmented, cynical, and increasingly institutionalized. Another problem with FOSS is that projects usually end up in one of a few states, a strong “dictator” model where someone drives the direction through sheer effort and resources, a loose community model where everything gets patched together by committee or eventual corporate stewardship.

Or someone gets frustrated enough to fork a project, but then these forks are often treated socially as hostile when that was the core ideology of FOSS.

A lot of modern “FOSS” infrastructure are effectively: corporate-funded, corporate-prioritized or community-accessible rather than community-directed. It's free in the sense of that you can download the source, compile it yourself but for yourself to contribute unless you have the resources, is hard and time consuming. So you end up following the path it's taking.

If the corporations benefiting from these ecosystems consistently reinvested back into the communities maintaining them the FOSS landscape would look very different if not more healthier, more sustainable, and far less bitter.