Wayland is not killing smaller distributions. Who even came up with that batshit crazy idea?
Killing is overly dramatic, but it’s putting a burden on certain projects if they want to convert to it and not all have the resources to tank it. I don’t see Window Maker porting their toolkit to Wayland, for instance.
But XWayland exists so I don’t see what’s the fuss.
Doesn’t mean I agree with it. It’s still an interesting topic to discuss IMO, hence the repost.
Flatpak is good for diversity. Users don’t need to worry about whether the obscure distro they want to use has the software they want in its repos. If a distro supports flatpak it will work with most popular software out of the box.
Plus, developers can create their own repositories that can then be used on any distro.
Still better than developers providing .tar.gz files or hosting an apt repo.
I may be misunderstanding flatpack, though I do understand the draw of all dependencies in one package.
One of the big things that drew me to linux some years ago was “oh, you don’t have to reinstall every dependency 101 times in a packaged exe so the system stays much smaller?” As well as in-place updates without a restart. It resulted in things being much much less bloated, or maybe that was just placebo.
Linux seems to be going in the flatpack direction which seems to just be turning it into a windows-like system. That and nix-like systems where everything is containerized and restarting is the only thing that applies updates seems to be negating those two big benefits.
X11 is already dead, and it will not become more or less usable it will always stay the way it’s and wayland will get better. that’s the difference and flatpak is just an option it doesn’t try to replace what’s already availible. spreading distrust and misinformation about these softwares doesn’t help
X11 is already dead
How do you mean that? I’ve been using X11 for like 17 years. i3 uses X11, and I will most likely not use another WM if I can help it. It’s perfect for me. X11 is available in the core repositories of all the big distros.
Curious to know what you mean by “dead”.
Just because they don’t do full releases doesn’t mean it isn’t developed anymore. They switched to updating modules individually, with three updates made this month. Doesn’t sound very abandoned to me.
It is not getting new features anymore. Just because the distro is packaging it doesn’t mean it’s not dead.
I heard Sway is very similar to i3. But I’m partial to hyprland myself
I’ll say that while it still has features that Wayland doesn’t it’s not dead, it doesn’t get updates yes but it still used by a lot of people for the fact that Wayland just doesn’t support some stuff that x11 does. Great example I have is TeamViewer and Nvidia+KDE
Sway is essentially i3 + Wayland, so it shouldn’t be a hard switch once X11 goes EOL.
I actually used Sway for a while. Can’t remember why I switched back though. What would X11 “going end-of-life” entail? Not being distributed/packaged anymore? Is there an official timeline for that or something?
I did but went back to i3 for some reason I can’t remember. I think it had something to do with DPI issues in wayland at the time, so the scaling was inconsistent between apps.
Wayland reduces bugs and standardizes the desktop, and flatpak makes it easier for distros to include apps without going through the process of packaging them.
This post is FUD bullshit, Wayland and Flatpak are making it easier to run an indie distro.
Wayland reduces bugs
As I have to give a few lectures, I can’t say I’m pleased with how screen-sharing or using a projector in the classroom fails almost half of the time and always embarrasses me in front of everyone. I ended up purging the Wayland stuff and going back to good ol’ i3 and I haven’t had a display-related issue ever since.
X11 works, it may not be as sexy or modern as Wayland but it’s battle-tested and just works and for the vast majority of people, excluding Wayland’s bugs, the differences are not even noticeable.
There are pros and cons.
Total centralization of the Linux Eco system isn’t good for anyone. But total fragmentation where there’s a million different distros that can all do basically the same thing isn’t good either.
Wayland and Flatpak are great projects though. Love seeing them get more adoption.
I mean, they’re never gonna be finished if people don’t migrate to them and work on them. A lot of the wayland issues like “wayland breaks X” is because of the devs of said app rather than wayland itself. Kinda like adobe products and Linux, it ain’t linux that’s breaking them.
Yeah this thread is full of people expecting the new thing to immediately surpass the old, ignoring the decades of development and refinement that went into the old solution.
do you really expect people, who do this work in their free time out of the goodness of their heart, to release fully finished products that are supposed to work 100% flawlessly right from the get-go? maybe FOSS isn’t the right space for you then.
There are projects that beg to differ. PipeWire, a perfect example. The author thought it wasn’t stable enough even though some distros addopted it as default. He switched to version 1.0 a few months ago.
And I do also use non-FOSS software. I use whatever I like, I don’t discriminate, FOSS or not. Sure, it’d be great if every piece of software was open source, but hey, things are what they are 🤷. DaVinci Resolve is closed source, but there are a lot of things NLE video editors can learn from it.
