Eldritch

Debian testing exists. It’s just not well promoted or publicly presented for that matter. But it’s not really any further behind than Ubuntu.

Also open suse tumbleweed. Is great. When you want something more up to date than fedora. But don’t want large chunks of your operating system to stop functioning randomly on an update like Arch. Because they pushed an intentionally breaking change, but nothing to fix it. And you happened not to read all 1000 change logs for the update, missing the relevant one.

I love Arch, but I wouldn’t touch it for desktop these days. I seriously don’t have the bandwidth to read 1000s of change logs every couple days. On an appliance or server? Sure. Most recently VLC stopped playing mkv files. Why?! A packaging change. Instead of a few large packages/dependencies. They were all broken out granularly. Which is fine. But since you didn’t have all the new packages installed before. All functionality moved to them just went poof. I don’t have enough fingers to count the times this sort of thing has happened over the years. It’s part of why i’m slowly transitioning to tumbleweed on most of my desktop systems from Arch.

Upon better reading it absolutely was. Disregard me.

They exist yes. Go ask the average person on the street the name more than one of them. At best some might know system 76. But can they buy them at the local best buy, apple store, or micro center? Lots of places don’t have a micro center. Micro center at least sells Linux and BSD media. I haven’t been in 8 months. But for the last 30 years they haven’t sold a pre installed system. Much less best buy or apple store.

More for sure if you include Darwin. Linux and BSD were largely similar for a long time. The divergence only really started the last 15-20 years.

It’s interesting to imagine where BSD would be today without all the litigation on the 90s. Would BSD be where Linux is today? Or would it still be in a similar situation due to it’s reluctance to break with system V traditions.

X11 is a display server. Wayland is a presentation layer. Different goals. I have run graphical multi-seat systems using x11. Something like that will never be possible in the same way for Wayland because it is out of the design scope

Oh absolutely. I said as much an earlier post they will coexist even if Wayland will be the default for most distros.

I’m sure there’s a little column A and a little column b. The recent update to blender with Vulcan was amazing for instance. Though I don’t think under wine / proton Vulcan is the default yet. But one thing I know Wayland absolutely did help with was tearing under a few applications.

100% a system D like issue. And I get it. People tend to hate change. The old init scripts work okay back in the day. And if you’re familiar with them I can see why you wouldn’t want it to change. But system D really has brought something to the game. It’s so much easier to enable disable services. No having to dig through init scripts trying to find the one you’re looking for which might be called through a script of a script of a script.

And while I hate to see fragmentation between the Linux and BSD space. Part of that is on the BSD space. Reluctance to do anything different than the way it was always done can and will hold you back. Not that BSD has ever been fragment free on its own.

Yes for many it’s not. Lots of those issues, while actual issues. Are niche issues. Issues I’ve personally had brushes with in many cases. As someone who’s used Linux and BSD since the early 90s. I know I’m not the average user these days. And I know X had it’s own similar issues over the years. Still does. For the average person using a single screen who doesn’t steam Etc. Wayland provides a very good experience. All the edge issues will be addressed individually as they were with X.

While I would like to see BSD support as well. Part of that is on the BSD devs and community. Many who are against it. There’s lots of areas BSD is unfortunately falling behind in. But that’s not everyone else’s problem. I would love to be able to run a BSD desktop. But it simply doesn’t have the software or support I look for. And that’s okay

Respectfully, disagree. A lot of the new modern users are into gaming. Something which Wayland specifically does better. I’m not just speaking from personal experience. Yes you could game under X11 before. But it wasn’t as smooth or without issue. I 100% have seen performance increases and stability increases after switching to Wayland with regards to gaming workloads.

We’ll get there. Honestly I think in the long run Wayland will be easier to troubleshoot and maintain. But then that may just be memories of troubleshooting XFree86 back in the 90s. I still have flashbacks.

X11 would have needed almost a complete rewrite. Wayland made sense. Eject the technical debt and focus on your use case. We aren’t time sharing on a large central mini computer/mainframe anymore. And even then they generally are full single user systems run in parallel under a hypervisor these days. As wasteful as that might be.

But there’s still occasions when you need to run a legacy application on old AIX, Irix, etc, or vax Hardware. And need a workstation. Which right now Wayland simply can’t do without x.

Yep absolutely. It’s been years since I’ve done that myself. But there’s lots of Legacy software out there. Especially on Legacy systems that are not being developed for at all anymore. That will continue to require X11. One of the other more Niche uses which Wayland doesn’t support I believe are multi graphical users on a single system. Again probably something I don’t think I’ve messed around much with in the last decade. But it was a fun feature. Wayland is much more focused on a single session.

And X11 will never be ready for most modern users. They have different goals. But that’s the thing with open source. As long as someone somewhere needs it. Even if 90% of us don’t need X11 for legacy software. It will still be here.