Good memories, but I am glad to see that X11 is now well and thoroughly legacy. Wayland and Pipewire has been thoroughly amazing by just breaking clean with the past. iw has done the same to a large degree. While systemd has its short comings, systemd-networkd, journald, and so on are now providing a cohesive system that is well aligned, even if not perfectly aligned with ones' expectation, I don't have to tinker to make systemd-networkd to work with journactl or the likes.

We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends. Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.

X11 is absolutely NOT legacy. It's still better in any relevant way than wayland. Freedesktop just wanted to kill it for weird reasons. But Xorg forks like Xlibre are very active and there are even new implementations like YServer. I still use X11 for every new setup.

People who say these things about X11 and anything non-systemd sound like out of touch newcomers unaware of the BSDs or mainline Linux distributions that haven't gone along with Red Hat's directions. There is really no issue with X11 that isn't solved with a few options set to the X executable or using something other than startx to initialize, but I think OpenBSD made the right call just forking it.

Every single thing under the Sun going into systemd is going to cause issues (and probably already has with age verification laws and such) with compliance where a company is a singular target (Red Hat under IBM) to compel to make undesired changes contrary to our interests as users.

Red Hat is probably an even bigger problem than GNOME.

On the topic of WMs, some of these classics are really great. Openbox is a favorite of mine among the floating, but bspwm has been my overall favorite for 11 years.

I don't think I'll switch to Wayland for a few years, until it's usable. They don't have a portable way to script it yet, like wmctrl or something. Can't get anything to work there.

I'm afraid you vastly underestimate what it takes to produce a competent GUI toolkit. Performance, portability, layout control, theming, keyboard control support, accessibility for things like screen readers, and, of course, a sane API.

And I don't mean the code, I mean the design / architecture / UX expertise.

So much emotion here: I'm not sure why Wayland enthusiast have to be so negatively disposed towards X11. I enjoy new ideas as much as anyone, but I also respect what works. Build something better, and people will switch.

As for X11, its network transparency is something I used a lot in the past and relied on. I miss it.

I'm currently writing an audio service and pipewire is definitely not amazing. Its an improvement to be sure. But audio on Linux is still a shit show compared to basically any other os

- We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends. Qt and KDE is does not count ...

There's a very good alternative in development - check out V OS - https://v-os.dev/ - it is attempting to port the Be / Haiku GUI and SDK on to Linux, and even though it's still an alpha-beta release, the experience is really good. Unlike GTK's "clunkiness", Be/Haiku GUI feels so buttery smooth, and consumes so little computing resource (compared to GTK or Qt). As they aren't re-inventing anything new, I have high hopes for it. It just needs more support from all of us to thrive.

> We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK

Can you explain why Gnome specifically? Genuine question. I know Gnome is very opinionated, many people don't like it, and these days there are super polished projects like Niri. But in what way is Gnome holding us back?

I'm very happy running Linux Mint with X, and I don't see why it would be legacy or even what Wayland does better. In fact I've read about many problems, and that's why Mint still doesn't use Wayland by default.

For most commercial software vendors that go out of their way to support Linux, it will account for less than 1% of their userbase. It already doesn't make any commercial sense for them to support it -- in a lot of cases it will be the project one or two passionate programmers that ported in their free time, and vouched to support it themselves.

They already have to deal with the fact that if they're shipping binaries that they actually want to work, they have to compile their own compiler, libc, libc++, Xlib, static link everything, don't touch anything the system provides, dynamically load the things you can't get around, test multiple .so paths for different distros, etc, etc, etc...

Now, on top of that, they're being asked to support a second completely different Window System layer, that an even smaller percentage of people use (and who mind you all also run Xwayland).Unlike X11, Wayland doesn't have one de-facto standard implementation, and the spec doesn't define anything - some common functionality is provided through different incompatible extensions, and some common functionality is not supported at all.

I was trying to set up my VR headset for Linux a few week back and I saw [1]. Feature disparity is so bad that Valve, the biggest corporate proponent of the Linux desktop, concluded they just can't support SteamVR on the biggest desktop environment, and basically tells you to switch to X or another compositor.

That's without going into the technical insanity of the protocol, like using sockets and a client-server architecture for something that can't actually run over the network, because Linux developers just can't envision a form of IPC that doesn't pass through the kernel and take 2ms, or the fact that the standard client library can't be static linked by default without you rewriting its build system.

If one day X11 dies, it will be because Linux has settled on the Win32 API, not Wayland.

[1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/18A4-1E10-8A94-3D...

Loving Gnome since like 15 years.

Switched for Unity for a few years when I was erring on Ubuntu side, where I like the minimalism style.

Gnome 3 was a shock but nothing any normal human being can easily overcome. The hardest was to live without a taskbar, but I'm free now.

Would never touch KDE-let-s-make-this-pixel-also-clickable, but that's the power of freedom: you can choose what you like.

If you want something to happen you can do it yourself.

However, if you are the type of person who calls people who work on Free Software that you are totally free to use or not "cancer" you probably will not get many people who want to work with you.

I have recently switched to https://duxlabs.dev/ and my experience is very good.

Pipewire even supports almost everything Jackd does while Wayland barely got remote display and screen recording. What breaking with the past are you referring to in the Pipewire case?

I have no idea what you write, but clearly what you write is absolutely incorrect.

See: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

Also I don't understand why you write that pipewire broke with the past. That's also totally incorrect.

Wayland I agree with your statement but that's a corporate-controlled project by the GNOMEy overlords, so this is not a surprise (GTK5 will support wayland only; that was one reason why I stopped writing more GTK code).

As for your systemd comment: again I have no idea what you write. It does not make any sense. And the word "cohesive" is odd: all the systemd components, of course, form a cohesive unit WITHIN ITSELF from the get go - that was the whole point for the systemd developers to make themselves more important. systemd was never a "replace init only" attempt, they deliberately took over the ecosystem here to leverage more control. And that also, kind of, makes sense for those controlling many computers in a, say, university campus or so; administrators find that some jobs were made easier by that. For me, and many others, systemd brought nothing to the table that was needed. They always built strawmen such as "you may abandon your legacy shell scripts booting your system" - I don't use shell scripts in general. All logic I have is done via ruby + yaml files mostly (or, data files that describe the logic in a DSL like manner), so I never had any use case for systemd. As for your claim that you do not have to tinker with systemd: again, I have no idea why you write this. It sounds like a very poor and one-sided attempt to promote systemd. You never had an issue? I had numerous issues whenever I would use systemd, starting from smaller to larger issues. For instance, I remember that my local clock was not well-aligned so I changed it. Then I tested again and noticed the clock did not change. It took me a while to figure out that systemd inserted itself here and ignored my attempt to fix the local clock. Past that point I treated systemd as an invasive virus that attempts to ignore my commands, so off it went. That's just one example of many more issues with systemd. The philosophy the systemd devs use is mega-aggressive and incompatible with many other things, including the old UNIX pipe idea as well as "everything is a file".

> We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends.

I would not use the term cancer, but I would agree that we could need more flexibility. We simply lack viable options here. Corporations de-facto control most of the code here. Or AI. Not a good future really.

> Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.

Again, no clue what you write here, but let's also be realistic: which alternatives to GTK or QT do you see coming up here? Plus, we then have more code for a toolkit. What we need is a meta-toolkit, that can be used in its own right (e. g. without qt and KDE) but also be used in way to allow people to create applications in qt and kde at the same time. One toolkit to rule them all. And it must be as flexible as possible. In many ways it is kind of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, de-facto really; would be nice to have a way to have something that could target all of the above, but I think the boat has sailed. HTML/CSS/JavaScript kind of won, and perhaps via webassembly we could at the least use something else other than JavaScript.