When I switched my mother, her only complaint was that the scroll bars were not as wide in Facebook.

My mother, 80 years old, uses Linux Mint.

It is a myth that Windows is easier to use than Windows. It is just what you know and it came with your computer.

I will believe it when I see it for China. They will probably just keep pirating Windows.

India is at something like 15% Linux though and probably going up.

As one practical example, a malicious program may monitor your key presses to extract your passwords (in web browsers or sudo).

Or it could be taking screenshots behind the scenes and sending that data remotely or to a local AI.

Or turning on your mic and….

The digital dependence on the US is much like the energy dependence on Russia.

Europe is ditching Russian energy. They may ditch US tech.

“It’s more like gnu”

You are correct. GNU has the bad habit of only working with itself as well. Systemd only works with Glibc so it fits in well.

The reality is that GNU is just a subset of the Red Hat Linux platform these days. Systemd is another part. GNOME is the other big chunk. They are all designed to work with each other and do not care if they work with anything else.

You cannot even decouple SystemD from Glibc, never mind separating the various components from each other. It is a bunch of processes but it is designed as a monolith.

Though I see Systemd as an improvement, I still do not like it.

The Chimera Linux FAQ captures my thoughts quite well:

https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-is-the-projects-take-on-systemd

One of the ironies with System76 is that they are taking so long to release their Wayland-only desktop that they are becoming one of the last bastions of Xorg.

I am confused. Autoclicker does not work?

https://github.com/konkitoman/autoclicker

Or do you mean keyboard input?

https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

Accessibility is better than reported on Wayland. It is being taken seriously.

https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blob/main/talon-requirements.md

A big factor in Europe right now is a shifting relationship with the US.

Companies, governments, and individuals have some incentive to find alternatives to big US tech. For operating systems, Linux is really the only option.

When Linux hits 10%, you will see hardware ship with Linux drivers day one.

Had the same experience at work. Brand new work laptop with Windows and a bunch of mandatory spyware. Personal laptop running Linux on 10 year old hardware. Linux machine is more responsive and pleasant to use.

Linux on old laptops is a joy. I spent my morning on an old MacBook Pro that I found on the recycled electronics bench when I dropped off some bottles. Runs great (Niri instead of Hyprland but similar).

I have not used Nix, so I may not know what I am talking about.

That said, I have been using Chimera Linux which uses the APK package manager. It works by maintaining a single file in /etc/apk/world that specifies all the packages the user wants on the system. This is used to calculate dependencies and install packages. When you “add” and “del” packages, all it is really doing is adding and removing from this list. If you remove a package, it will remove all the dependencies too unless they appear in the “world” file.

If you do not specify a version number for a package, you get the latest. But you can pin versions of you want.

If you copy the world file from one system to another, you get the same set of installed packages.

So, if I use git to backup my world file, maybe a couple of other entries in /etc, and the dot files in my home directory, I have pretty much everything I need to completely recreate my system.

Is it really worth all the extra complexity of Nix?

Well, if you use Wayback, I am not sure you can use Wayland applications. Hoping somebody can confirm or deny this.

I think you effectively would be ditching Wayland though as I do not think you can run Wayland applications.

I am trying to understand the difference between Wayback and running Xwayland in Cage.

I’m Wayback, will I still be able to run Wayland applications? Or am I literally just running an Xserver that uses Wayland for the DDX layer?