As soon as an article starts by telling you that Wayland is 18 years old, you know where it is going to go. Yes, the very beginning of the Wayland experiment started long ago but it was not something anybody was expected to use most of that time.

The very first Wayland-only desktop environment ever, COSMIC, launched just last month. Should I write an article about how amazing Wayland is despite being so new?

A more neutral view might be to use Sway itself as a benchmark as it was one of the earliest Wayland compositors. The Sway project is less than 10 years old. The most complete Wayland environment available today, KDE Plasma, started to experiment with Wayland around then as well.

But Wayland has only really come into its own in the last 5 years with remaining edge cases regularly being addressed over the last two.

And we are now in a place where Wayland works for most people. The edge cases that remain are largely more exotic, like this guys 8K monitor. It would be dishonest to pretend Wayland’s evolution has been rapid. It has largely been dysfunctional. And real gaps remain. But it is already superior to X11 in many ways and the list of remaining use cases not well addressed continues to drop.

Yes, Wayland does a lot of stuff better than X11.

A Linux desktop user that started in Wayland a couple of years ago would be able to write a similarly negative article about Xorg if they tried to switch to it. The two systems are different. Neither is absolutely better than the other today. But Wayland is improving and Xorg is not.

And more than half of Linux desktop users run Wayland now. And 4 out of 5 new Linux desktop users start on Wayland and never switch. Linux is a Wayland first OS. So, when articles like this complain about how long it would take to reconfigure their systems for Wayland, they miss an important point. The Wayland way is the “correct” way now, or at least the most common way. The X11 config is the weird one.

And one of the things Wayland does better is run Wayland apps. The foot terminal mentioned in this article cannot be run on X11 at all. It is Wayland only. All of the apps an X user tries on Wayland will at least run. Not so the other way around.

When GNOME and KDE shed their X11 compatibility, they will be able to more freely innovate Wayland only features. As that starts to happen, it will become more normal to create Wayland only applications. This won’t be a problem as 80 percent or more of Linux desktop uses will be using Wayland-only desktop environments.

And that is what will ultimately doom X11. It will become impractical to run and X server instead of Wayland due to the important Wayland apps that cannot run on such a desktop.

Anyway, it was a well written article and mostly fair. It will be very interesting to see how the set of requirements fares 1 - 2 years from now. GNOME and KDE will be Wayland only. COSMIC will have matured. Wayland compositors will have standardized a bit.

I suspect that things will be looking very nice.

This was obviously meant sarcastically. And the recent Microsoft post is clearly more aspirational than real. But it is much more real than you probably think.

This is all about:

1 - existing ecosystems (eg. tooling)

2 - existing code bases

3 - existing dev skills

It is also a trick of absolute vs relative numbers. Rust can be growing at a MUCH faster rate and still add fewer developers annually than C++.

The C++ line will go up, peak, and then go down forever (probably never to zero)

This is just like saying China is adding more coal power plants. True. But at the rate solar is growing, that will not be true for long. And once the absolute number lines cross, the old tech decline will be as steep as the new tech rise was.

Well, I don’t know Fortran 66. So, obviously step one is having an LLM convert it to Python for me. /s

Well obviously with vibe coded stuff, you just put the code back in the AI and ask for documentation.

Problem solved. /s

COSMiC has made Iced and Smithay stronger. Now Niri is based on Smithay. I for one are happy they spent their time on something other than GNOME.

GNOME has been shedding market share to KDE and now COSMIC is going to take a chunk of the rest.

Sour grapes.

Especially on Debian, I would not be messing with the base / host system so much. This is why a VM is being recommended.

My solution would be to use Distrobox to run another Linux distro in a container. This could a distro that defaults to a version of Python you need like Arch, Fedora, or Ubuntu.

This is a good idea even if you use something else to get the Python version you want. Especially so.

The big advances of this solution are that you get native performance, can see all your normal files, and have an environment that you can customize that does not mess up your host system. You can have other Distroboxes with other tools. You can delete your environment and start over.

Unbelievably ignorant take.

Arch and its forks are, in my view, the BEST options for a daily use desktop.

FreeBSD has made a real laptop push recently and 15.1 is supposed to offer KDE out of the box.

Depending on your hardware, it is really viable now.

/tmp should be just that (temporary).

There should not be any ill effects to completely empty /tmp

Some distros put /tmp on a ram drive that gets created fresh (and empty) with each reboot.

Almost everything you care about should be in /home so back that up. Many people keep it on a separate partition or drive to make changing distros (or reinstalling the existing one) easier.

Most of your system config is in /etc so you may want to make a copy of that too.

But the proper process on Linux is not to re-install. It should not be necessary.

On top of this, part of the reasons to use containers is that you can create and destroy them at will while leaving your host tidy and stable. I use Distrobox quite a bit for this reason.

I think a fair number of the “Wayland haters” upgraded to KDE on Debian 13 and found out that things had gotten better in the years since Debian 12 was released. Or their Debian-based distro did the same.

As the percentage of Wayland users goes above 75%, it gets harder to trash Wayland as, instead of people coming to agree with you, the majority of the comments support Wayland instead.

We are in the final transition where an increasing number of users have never used Xorg at all. Pretty much the only “new” Xorg users coming to desktop Linux these days are via Linux Mint. Once it goes Wayland, Xorg use in Linux will likely drop below 10%. XFCE is the other “big” X11 DE but it is already defaulting to Wayland on some distros.

We already have our first Wayland-only DE, COSMIC, and GNOME and KDE are not far behind. Despite it lagging, I do not think Cinnamon will keep x11 long after they switch.

There are some new places for x11 fans to go though. There is XLibre of course. And now there are Wayback and Phoenix. So people do not have to complain as loudly that they are being “forced” onto Wayland as Xorg development slows to a crawl. Both Phoenix and Wayback use the kernel DRM and KMS and so they are much smaller and easier to build and ship even if distros drop Xorg. Phoenix may even run Wayland apps. So if you love some x11 wm, it looks like you will be able to keep it around a bit longer.

Decent point. Not every grandmother is my grandmother. And a 21 year old that has only used phones and tablets to consume content may actually be less tech literate than an older person with no screen experience that knows how to fix their car, blender, or sewing machine.

If you install a kernel from the Arch repos, DKMS will build the kernel module for you automatically as well as the initial RAM disk and boot entries. Kernel upgrades take a little longer but you do not have to do anything manually.

It will work with custom kernels too but, if you do build your own kernel, you have to make sure a couple of options are selected.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA

There is so much misinformation and bad advice in this thread.

Thankfully, there are a few that correctly just say install nvidia-580xx-dkms

You can install new kernels after that. There is nothing to manually manage. They do not have to be LTS.

Hopefully we will start to see some this year or next. Maybe not Apple Silicon level but Ascalon shows a lot of promise. And something may come out of the Qualcomm Ventana acquisition.

Still waiting for the latest Spacemit to drop as well, which will at least be RVA23. Ascalon will be the first “high performance” RISC-V though.

This is not meant to fight but to reveal an alternate perspective.

I never understand why people leave these comments. That is, I do not truly understand the objection. I assume these comments are anti-Apple or anti-corporate in some way but I am really just guessing.

Here is what I think could motivate people to work on Linux support for this hardware.

1 - people have this hardware or like it and want to run Linux on it. In other words, people with the skills are serving their own interests and not driving towards some great social outcome like the question “why not riscv” would suppose. This is the “scratching your own itch” aspect of Open Source.

2 - people with the skills find this hardware interesting or are attracted to the challenge that it has been made difficult. Similar to #1 with a different motivations but still a personal one.

3 - some people are drawn to “freeing” things that are closed. The more proprietary, the more attractive it is as a target.

4 - people with the skills are thinking of their impact on the world and realize that these are extremely popular devices that are destined for the landfill after really short lives if allowed to remain fully proprietary.

If I had the skills, honestly I would find all of these compelling. The last one would provide the greatest fulfillment. There are A LOT of these devices being sold. I think Apple may be the single most popular laptop brand. The social good that comes from providing Linux support for Apple Silicon may be greater than time spent on any other hardware.

I am somebody that will ultimately benefit from all these efforts. It has been years since I have given Apple any money but quite like their hardware. I have 4 old Apple laptops, 2 iMacs, and one Mac Pro. These were all bought used or acquired for free. They are amazing Linux machines. I do not have any Apple silicon but I almost certainly will at some point. And it looks like the M1 and M2 hardware is already a great experience. In my view, old high-end gear is far better than new low-end gear. An Apple M1 laptop today is still nicer than the lower half of the Windows market. Buying a used Mac keeps two machines out of the landfill.

But, if I had the skills, the joy of just getting it to work would also be a motivator. It would be a fascinating project. And it is one that brings a lot of positive attention and even employment opportunity as we can see from where Asahi Linux contributors have ended up. Making Apple Silicon work provides a lot of what draws people to write free software.

Developing the RISC-V ecosystem would also be fulfilling. But this even helps with that. Creating a large and vibrant ARM Linux desktop community helps diversify and mature Linux in all kinds of ways that will also benefit RISC-V. One of these is just normalizing for us users the idea of running on something that is not x86. Another is increasing the size of the software ecosystem that builds and runs on RISC (either ARM or RISC-V.

And if the objection is that Apple will see greater demand for their proprietary products as a result of these efforts, I think we are greatly overestimating the current size of the community as a percentage or the overlap between “mainstream”’ Apple buyers and those of us with the patience to wait or suffer the limitations.

You can install NVIDIA-580-DKMS from the AUR. Problem solved.

Point taken but….

UML requires:

1 - extensive support from the host kernel above and beyond what is required to execute for regular programs

2 - the guest kernel to be specially compiled to be a UML guest

In other words, even though UML allows a guest Linux kernel to execute as a process on a host Linux kernel, that Linux kernel is not “just a program” like every other user mode application is.