It IS the early days of GNOME. MATE started with the source code of the last GNOME 2 release.

MATE exists because people loved GNOME 2 and hated GNOME 3.

You do not need to understand anything about X11 vs Wayland. Use whatever your distro of choice defaults to.

Wayland is the future. Every Linux desktop user not fighting hard to avoid it will be using Wayland in 2 years. The majority are already.

Wayland and X11 are both protocols. They are a way for graphical applications to talk to a “display server” (your graphical desktop).

X11 was invented in the 80’s. Until recently, there was essentially only one surviving implementation on Linux—something called Xorg. While Xorg was the display server, you had to add something called a “window manager” to control what your desktop would look like and how windows would behave.

While Wayland essentially does the same thing as X11, it was built to quite a different set of design criteria. If you have not been part of the history, it is not worth knowing about. Security is one of the big improvements.

Perhaps the only detail worth mentioning is that the display server and window manager functions have been combined in Wayland into something called a “compositor”. So while everybody was using Xorg back in the X11 days, there are many competing compositor implementations in Wayland. They differ not just in how they manage windows but also in how them implement many other details like how to take screenshots, manage multiple monitors, or handle scaling. There are a set of standards that define this behaviour. It is a bit like the web where you have different web browsers and web servers but the same web applications work on all of turn (which perhaps some small differences).

The two systems both “do the same thing” and are quite different at the same time. If you use one, switching to the other may seem painful as things that worked may not anymore and even things that still work may be done differently or require quite different knowledge. Not many people switch from Wayland to X11 but anybody that used Linux 5 years ago has had to switch from X11 to Wayland (or feel pressured to). Not all of them are happy about it. Some of them rely on workflows that Wayland does not yet or many never support. These people consider the switch to Wayland a really big deal which is why you hear about it so much.

But, if you already use Wayland, ignore it. Everybody will stop talking about it soon as almost everybody has switched. The majority that have not switched are using popular desktops like Cinnamon or XFCE that have also not switched. They have not switched as they want to make the transition very seem-less for their users. Which also means you do not have to think about it. One day they will move you and hopefully you will not notice. Or, even better, it will seem like a bunch of new features in a new release.

That amount of money is one developer full time maybe. Which can make a really, really big difference for an Open Source project actually.

I hope they do not take their foot too far off the gas before completing their Wayland transition.

Once KDE, GNOME, COSMIC, Budgie, and Cinnamon are all Wayland, 90% of all Linux desktops will be Wayland. With XFCE, it could be 95%.

I am looking forward to essentially all Linux desktop users being on Wayland so we can stop acting like it is not already the norm or even pretending that it is not going to happen. I am looking forward to putting it behind us and we are so close.

At the same time, I have a lot of respect for conservative desktops like Cinnamon and XFCE that, while acknowledging that Wayland is the future, are taking great pains to minimize disruption for their current users and even to allow users to keep X11 as a fully supported platform. I am all for that.

I do not expect Cinnamon to maintain X11 as an option very long after they switch to Wayland as the default. First while many distros ship Cinnamon, it is really a product of the Mint project and Mint is very much a Linux Desktop. Second, Mint does not have the resources as they point out in this article. Of course, I could be wrong.

XFCE will probably keep X11 around much longer. First, XFCE is very popular in non-Linux settings. But mostly I say this because xfwm4 itself takes very little dev effort and it is the only XFCE component really tied to x11. Xorg is essentially in features freeze. As long as XLibre does not break everything, xfwm4 will just continue to work. The other components of XFCE work fine in both environments already. The goal of xfwl4 (the XFCE Wayland compositor) is to mirror the xfwm4 experience. And xfwl4 is deferring to other components to define behaviour (eg. xfsession and xfdesktop). So, it should be easy to keep the overall XFCE experience in sync on both display servers without much wasted effort.

I have well over a dozen Linux machines running in my home. More than half of them would be considered garbage by most people. Clearly, I disagree.

I have never had a problem with LMDE. My mother has been using it for about a year now. I used to have to come solve Windows problems for her a couple times a year but she had never asked me for any help with LMDE.

Cinnamon is not a “fork” of GNOME. MATE is a fork of GNOME as MATE started from GNOME source code.

Cinnamon was a reaction to GNOME 3. But Cinnamon was written from scratch to reflect a more traditional desktop metaphor. It was not created from existing GNOME code.

In the days of GTK 3, Cinnamon shipped quite a few of the default GNOME apps. Later, when GTK4/ libadwaita appeared, Cinnamon stayed with GTK3 and formed the XApps project which did fork many GNOME apps to stay on GTK3. XApps was meant to be a cross-desktop project serving all the GTK desktop environments.

These days, Cinnamon is trying to fork libadwaita to make GTK4 apps look better on their desktop.

In general, Cinnamon is fairly conservative. They are the last major desktop environment to default to X11 for example (though you will disagree with that view if you count XFCE as one of the major DEs).

There is no continent called America.

However, there is a country that hundreds of millions of people identify as “America”.

Be smarter.

I am from BC. Sure not every Canadian is like that but this person totally exists.

Ya, and Europe is not a continent. What a super intelligent position to take.

There is no “America” by your definition. There are 800 million people in “the Americas”. Half of them refer to their county as simply “America”. Like 500 times a day. At least 100 million of the rest also use this label for the USA as does a big chunk of the world. When Churchill said, “You can always count of the Americans to do the right thing but too late”, was he talking about Chile or Canada?

I would say the “United States” but then some moron will point out that this could mean the United States of Mexico as if just saying “United States” or “America” is confusing anybody. Does the US National Guard protect Mexico? Cuba or Belize? The US Marines?

Do you think “America, fuck ya” is something people from Kentucky say to celebrate Honduras? Do you think “America the beautiful” is a song about Peru? Do you think the “American National Anthem” is pro Mexico?

Do you think “American football” is what they play in Brazil? Because they sure don’t play it in Canada.

And the 7,000,000,000,000 YouTube videos about “the American President”, who elected him?

It is hard for me to believe that somebody thought this would seem like a smart thing to say.

You don’t like to be publicly respected for your informed opinions?

Why not?

Everybody knows what you are saying. What percentage would you estimate are impressed?

So, if I wrote an AI preface to somebody else’s book, they lose their copyright?

Seems very unlikely. Can you cite any case law for this?

Promise free cloud forever. Randomly delete it without recourse once people come to depend on it.

Check: sounds pretty evil.

I am a big SQL fan but not all data has to be relational.

Let’s say I want the GPS coordinates of ten million vehicles every 5 seconds. I have a vehicle id, a timestamp, and coordinates. I do not care if a few writes get lost. Why does this have to be relational?

And perhaps I also record other info that may change from vehicle to vehicle. Perhaps just values that are true if present. DoorOpen, BrakeApplied, LightsOn, LightBarOn, EngineOn, etc. I may only be displaying this data in a UI. I may get different values from every vehicle or even every write. There is no “schema”. I mean, I can have a JSON field or something in my relational table? But this is not exactly relational anymore.

It is because it only “gets out of your way” if you like its choices. If you have different preferences, the strong opinions very much get in your way.

There is a reason GNOME extensions are so popular. And those extensions break all the time.

First, Teams works well on Linux. I have been a desktop Linux user since the 90’s and I use Teams every day (week days at least).

Second, that does not mean they use Teams as their preferred collaboration software.

Even on Windows, you use what the meeting organizer used to schedule the meeting. And if you interact with external companies, you are going to be joining Teams meetings regardless of your preferences.

And, if you had to make a reference you thought everybody would get, Teams or Zoom seem like your best bet.

So making reference to something someone one would say in Teams is not exactly Ronald McDonald admitting he eats at Wendy’s.

If Teams IS their preferred solution, I think the bigger deal may be a European company relying on a US cloud provider, even more than proprietary vs FOSS. At least, that is my view.

I would love a great Open Source video conferencing option to emerge and become popular though. As above, this kind of software has network effects and I would rather get invited to Open Source meetings if possible.

I used to be an audiophile. I spent a lot of money on speakers, and amplifiers, and DACs. But I always found the audiophile cable crowd a bit nuts. And the people that are buying audiophile versions of stuff in the digital domain are full on delusional.

I say “used to be” for two reasons. One, hearing everything does not always mean better. A lot of the time it just reveals imperfections in the recording. And depending on the space, and ambient noise, more headroom can be worse because it just pushes the quiet stuff below the background. And, you are going to have to listen to music in places that you do not have your gear and it is going to sound bad if you get too used to the good stuff. So your music life may be worse overall.

But the biggest difference is that I am older. I just cannot tell the difference as well as I used to.

But most people spend too much money on the equipment and not enough on the sources. You do not need a $20,000 setup if you are listening to badly encoded MP3 or AAC files for example.

But if you have high quality FLAC or Opus sources (or really high-end analog), you do not have to be an audiophile to tell the difference. Same with linear power supplies. You can hear the difference even if you do not spend so much money.

Like wine, audiophiles often make it more about the money they spend than the quality they are getting or the experience they are having.

That said, I can still hear well enough to know that 80% of the people that play music around me turn it up past what their amp can handle and it clips like crazy. I do not know how people listen to that.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that they like Debian but dislike systemd.

I cannot wait until GNU HURD is ready and the GNU/Linux crowd migrates to it.

The rest of us can then replace Glibc with musl, GNU utils with UUtils, GCC with Clang and we will not have to listen to this GNU/Linux crap anymore.

I mean, all the GNU stuff is great and I use them all the time. But it is ridiculous in 2026 that people want to brand the entire OS with the makers of 3% of the packages (all of which have world-class alternatives). Especially since almost all of those packages are majority authored by Red Hat.

GNU is great and massively important historically. But the end of the GNU/Linux nonsense cannot come fast enough.