Distros should be free to evolve and fill any amd every niche. Let the rivers of life flow.
It is by the juice of distro that thoughts acquire speed, the fingers acquire stains. The stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my rig in motion.
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.
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.
Plus, developers can create their own repositories that can then be used on any distro.
Developers are exceptionally bad at packaging software though.
Still better than developers providing .tar.gz files or hosting an apt repo.
Depends, at least with the APT repo there is a chance they used lintian to avoid the worst mistakes.
So having 1 packaging format that works across distros is good.
To devils advocate a little in general with this topic: For wider spread adoption, Linux kinda needs to adopt around more standards. If you put yourself in the shoes of the average windows or Mac (even iOS/Android) user; it’s an overall standardized experience.
Linux now, is mostly a choice of DE and package manager. I still absolutely want distros like arch and Gentoo to still exists as they are.
Man…we’ve been saying that since '99…
I mean it has gotten a lot better. Dependency hell is mostly a thing of the past. If you were around back then using it then you should know the suffering we all went through to get ANY sort of usability out of it. Half the time it wouldn’t even fucking work at all due to some weird hardware you had, or you were limited to terminal only because XFree86 didn’t know what to make of your video card (it was a time of cheap shitbox Pentium MMX/Pentium II/Celeron machines, some of which came in cow print boxes). It sure has come a long way from my perspective.
Windows and Mac don’t have standards; they’re single solitary stand alone monoliths. The user experience is the same in their walled gardens because they are the same, not because those systems embrace standards. In particular Microsoft’s lack of standards has been a point of pain for Linux and FOSS users for decades. Linux has actual standards and that is exactly why there is so much diversity. That diversity would have crumbled into chaos long ago if the Linux community did not embrace standards.
Flatpak doesn’t conform to the XDG home directory, and that upsets me. Also we have an ongoing dispute between SI and IEC units on their GitHub. But I like it otherwise.
The way the flatpak devs responded to the xdg base dir request made me not ever going to use flatpak again, fuck them.
What did they say?
Oh, no, it’s Patrick (tingping). He is very stubborn and doesn’t listen to reason. https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/5504
I really wished that he didn’t participate in the XDG problem, but he did. Then the IEC issue is probably also be screwed in the end.
I didn’t know flatpak was using MB instead of MiB, ever since I moved to linux most apps I’ve used report MiB instead.
Edit: I checked my CLI tools because the guy said that CLI tools are all over the place, the only one that doesn’t use MiB is lf.
Edit2: I lost my shit when I checked the profile of patrick and the first thing in the description says gnome developer, holy shit this can’t be lmao.
Not doing that is the whole point of flatpak. XDG_HOME is a bad design because it leads to a giant and hard to sift through swamp of mixed files, with no separation in terms of tidyness and security whatsoever.
Honestly anything that doesn’t get ported to wayland is probably old enough that it doesn’t really make sense to use as your primary desktop anyway. The most niche DE I regularly use is NsCDE, but it’s entirely FVWM scripts and FVWM is planning on adding wayland support. It’ll be a little sad to lose things like Trinity, WindowMaker, and Afterstep, but they were never amazing anyway and either way I doubt X will actually be unusable for a long time still.
I miss bspwm, none of the Wayland compositors work quite the same. Hyprland is close, but it’s just not quite as good. I moved to Wayland for the security benefits, but I miss X11/bspwm.
The worst part is there’s no standardization around screenshots/screen sharing/etc. so every DE/WM in Wayland has to be supported separately, or implement wlroots; which restricts how the software can be written.
The second statement is not true, the standardization is flatpak portals and they by now cover almost every aspect of the system. The screenshot api is this: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html#gdbus-org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot
Niche X11 projects die, niche wayland projects emerge… Nothing’s really gonna change here. And packages SHOULD be unified. There is no response reason to package chromium in 15 different ways for every distro.
Why not? Maybe I’m using a niche architecture which doesn’t gets built by default. Or maybe I don’t use glibc.
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.
My comment was about distributions specifically and those package Wayland since ages.
Someone on reddit.
Might as well be someone on lemmy since you reposted it here?
Doesn’t mean I agree with it. It’s still an interesting topic to discuss IMO, hence the repost.
I mean you do agree with it, clearly.
I actually stated in the title I don’t.
Well that’s confusing because the meme is complaint text with Hulk saying that he sees this as an absolute win and you titled the post “I don’t” which means you don’t see this as absolute win and therefore agree with complaint text in the image.
Yes, I don’t see this is as a win at all… what’s your point?
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.
Reduces bugs 🤣
Adding 10 bugs to your apps for every bug removed from the display manager
I like the way standardisation is going, everything is going to be on the bee standard and that that isnt being updated too well too bad. What seperates us from the windows users is we can evolve if ya look at the distro tree it looks a lot like natrual selection to me
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”.
Sway is essentially i3 + Wayland, so it shouldn’t be a hard switch once X11 goes EOL.
by dead I mean abandonware, not devoloped for anymore
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’s on life support but it is doomed.
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Why not?
It’s killing what effectively is the backbone of what makes up Linux and the open source world - diversity.
There’s an increasing amount of wayland compositors, so I don’t think diversity goes away.
Additionally, hyprland supports plugins which can do most things an X.org window manager could do. E.g. there’s a plugin to support river’s window layout protocol, which allows for creating custom window layout generator.
Diversity doesn’t just vanish, it’s replaced by new possibilities, created by solid protocol specifications with multiple implementations.
Similarily, nixpkgs and other repos continue to grow, just like flathub does too. These projects aren’t killing diversity, they’re enabling it.
I was talking in general, didn’t have Wayland in mind in particular… but I did have systemd in mind.
Linux’es diversity has never been found in the large fundamental pieces of software. Instead it’s typically been found in the nooks and crannies between them. We’ve typically had one or several of those and most have used those. It’s the kind of diversity you find between evolutionary differences between the same species, not revolutionary differences.
Still, we are where we are thanks to evolutionary dead ends (amongst other things).
the only reason this bothers me is… ew… flatpak.
People complaining about something opensource not doing what they want it to do: dudes/dudettes, if you want to maintain X11, go right ahead. Or if you want it maintained, pay somebody to do it. But stop this incessant whining about opensource devs choosing a direction you don’t like and pretending it’s the end of the world. This isn’t some faceless, megacorp with closed-source shit you have no control over.
If all the people complaining about wayland either put their energy to positive stuff like making wayland better or making X11 better, this wouldn’t be a problem.
My pet peeve is when people complain someone else’s free labor isn’t being done in the way they’d prefer. First of all, it’s entitled. Secondly, complaining on social media rarely if ever accomplishes anything in FOSS land.
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That’s exactly what I was I saying! Wow, your reading comprehension gets five stars and a kiss on the check. Papa Wouter must be impressed!
Counterpoint, if all of the people advocating for wayland actually worked on improving wayland to a usable state instead maybe people would actually want to use it.
No one’s forcing you to use it. If you don’t want to, stick to X11. I’ve been testing wayland for a few months now and it’s fine. It does most of I want it to. I don’t need fancy fractional scaling, adaptive refresh rates, or whatever other fancy stuff people complain about that isn’t there. It shows my windows, allows screen-share, and… that’s it. Only thing missing for me is scriptability.
I’m not advocating for Wayland nor X11, just saying to stop shitting on devs who give a lot of free time to write opensource code that none of us have to pay for. All we have to do is be nice - maybe report bugs, maybe maybe donate if we have the means.
The several distros is a thing of sheer beauty. It’s like the meritocratic free market – everyone can participate and the only way to win is to make something better than anyone else.
