The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[teriyakiburns]

it sound like wayland isn't a complete utility but a specification

That's exactly what it is. A protocol spec, written by gnomeists to cater to their foot-fetishism. There's a reference implementation called Weston, but it isn't widely used.

The annoying part is, there's no actual issue with the idea of writing a common protocol and having multiple implementations. X11 is, ultimately, also a protocol, with XOrg being the most popular implementation. The problem is that Wayland is a shit protocol, with multiple huge gaps that the Wayland organisation refuse to address or claim are for "security". It breaks shit in exciting new ways though, so it's popular with the sort of people who work for red hat (a software support and licensing company that makes more money if things don't work properly).

 

[Akerman]

I do not agree with the idea that developers who have experience working in both X11 and Wayland all love Wayland. For example, here is KiCad's view of it:

KiCad does run on Wayland systems, but with significant limitations and known issues that substantially degrade the user experience. While you can design PCBs using KiCad on Wayland, you will encounter numerous problems that we cannot fix at the application level.

These problems exist because Wayland’s design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows and macOS have relied on for decades—things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight.

The fragmentation doesn’t help either. GNOME interprets protocols one way, KDE another way, and smaller compositors yet another way. As application developers, we can’t depend on a consistent implementation of various Wayland protocols and experimental extensions. Linux is already a small section of the KiCad userbase. Further fragmentation by window manager creates an unsustainable support burden.Most frustrating is that we can’t fix these problems ourselves. The issues live in Wayland protocols, window managers, and compositors. These are not things that we, as application developers, can code around or patch.

We are not the only application facing these challenges and we hope that the Wayland ecosystem will mature and develop a more balanced, consistent approach that allows applications to function effectively. But we are not there yet.

More details: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

Their recommendation? Use X11-based desktop environments. - So yeah, not really positive and as a mostly hobby developer myself I can only say my experience has been very similar when I tried to port some of my scripts over from my X11 environment. There are probably ways they can deal with it, same with how Global Hotkeys can use portals, but the issue is that this sometimes come with their own problems or aren't compatible to what you want to do. The point is that it's not really an equivalency and is a regression for many use cases. It's all done for "security", but it's way too locked down. An up to date X11 would be welcomed by many people, the better question is if XLibre can do it, but the will is clearly there.

 

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I do not agree with the idea that developers who have experience working in both X11 and Wayland all love Wayland. For example, here is KiCad's view of it:

Um, this guy sounds like a massive bullshit artist. Why does he want his 33 year old application to be compatible across multiple operating systems and JUST WORK?

Any Gnome developer worth his programming socks looks forward to completely rewriting his unoptimized Python hobby application from scratch every couple of years to support GTK5/6/7 with less features than ever before. They don't WANT stable interfaces, they don't WANT functioning compatibility layers, they don't WANT a new system that's supposed to completely replace the one that's worked for most of our lifetimes to have the basic features that were established as necessary more than four decades ago. They WANT to continually chase changes that were done incorrectly and didn't need to be made and shouldn't have been made. That's what it's all about.

 

[Slav Power]

From reading this thread there are apparently Linux users who don't run their own local DNS server so they can look up the devices on their network and then apply their own curated set of blocklists.

Imagine not running Pi-Hole with unbound on your homelab SFF PC for an independent DNS server with domain filtering. Shit's documented so plainly even a chimp could set it up. However, if running the NTP server requires a hardware atomic clock expansion card then yeah no fucking wonder most people don't self-host that shit. Setting it up to rely on something like DCF-77 would be even more complicated.

 

[Betonhaus]

Where's Solus on the Linux rankings?

 

[ZMOT]

Mostly removed for "security" reasons but I imagine that's just a cope for them being lazy.

I also suspect the long game. as mentioned redhat makes more money if shit doesn't work, but if they're the ones in charge of what gets implemented and can push it, it becomes the de facto standard. it's basically how microsoft has been operating for decades and became the company it is today.

or put more simple "you'll all use gnome and the way we do things eventually anyway" (especially with them in charge of the only other alternative, what a coincidence).

that's why I really hope xlibre takes off, only to take a big fat dump on that faggy scheme.

 

[analrapist]

Where's Solus on the Linux rankings?

Theory-first analysis: Bespoke package manager, NIH symptoms. Might work great. IDK. Another interesting data point to watch, given how Xorg features in its Technologies list ( https://getsol.us/solus/technologies/ ). Interesting dependency-focused build system. Solbuild seems neat. They write a lot of code in Go. Budgie is written in Vala, the weird GTKObject-based language.

Seems a sensible choice for someone who likes Mint, but rough edges will be weird to solve because it's not "like" most other distroes. No idea how readily you'll find them. Project gives a very polished, consistent vibe, devs seem like they're not resting on their laurels.

 

[Ferryman]

Alright guys, I need some input: FreeBSD or OpenBSD? Gut says OpenBSD cause no CoC cancer and much higher focus on cleanliness & security, but then FreeBSD is bigger, has more packages, and is allegedly easier to configure and troubleshoot. I have never used a BSD system before, so thoughts & advice are appreciated. The host machine will be an X230, which I'm pretty sure should have good hardware support for both.

 

[timcooksucker]

Alright guys, I need some input: FreeBSD or OpenBSD? Gut says OpenBSD cause no CoC cancer and much higher focus on cleanliness & security, but then FreeBSD is bigger, has more packages, and is allegedly easier to configure and troubleshoot. I have never used a BSD system before, so thoughts & advice are appreciated. The host machine will be an X230, which I'm pretty sure should have good hardware support for both.

FreeBSD has the linuxulator which is cool. Also has Nvidia drivers. If those aren't your main concerns, OpenBSD is probably better.

 

[DavidS877]

DCF-77

European typing detected.

GPS isn't that hard, one Raspberry Pi, one POE hat, one GPS module, one exterior waterproof box to house the pi, one GPS antenna wired to said box, one POE cable to power said box.

At the very least setup your router and file server as local NTP servers slaved to the Internet and then point all your devices at them so you don't have every single device on your network going out to the Internet for time service.

 

[Betonhaus]

Theory-first analysis: Bespoke package manager, NIH symptoms. Might work great. IDK. Another interesting data point to watch, given how Xorg features in its Technologies list ( https://getsol.us/solus/technologies/ ). Interesting dependency-focused build system. Solbuild seems neat. They write a lot of code in Go. Budgie is written in Vala, the weird GTKObject-based language.

Seems a sensible choice for someone who likes Mint, but rough edges will be weird to solve because it's not "like" most other distroes. No idea how readily you'll find them. Project gives a very polished, consistent vibe, devs seem like they're not resting on their laurels.

Playing around with it in a VM it does let me run the apps I use regularly and generally looks slick, I think I'll try installing it and see how it goes.

can i rsync /home to a different drive and rsync -avP it back after installing? if my main drive is a 500GB NVMe drive should i just partition it so that / only gets 50gb and the rest of the drive is a /home partition so i don't have to migrate all the time? with Linux Mint only 33gb of my / drive is not in /home and there's a Solus.gcow2 file but the file size doesn't add up properly with disk usage

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Y'all autistic

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

Gut says OpenBSD cause no CoC

Theo De Raat is also Canadian, so you're only part of five eyes instead of getting assraped by the NSA directly if that matters.

 

[Slav Power]

European typing detected.

>implying he didn't knew already

GPS isn't that hard

>starts to list an entire electronic project just to get local NTP running
See, that's what I meant. With Pi-Hole it's a matter of maybe less than half an hour of command line fuckery in a new Proxmox container to have a local recursive DNS server with filtering running. No need to come up with a hardware add-in to get it working, which is why having Pi-Hole is trivial and everyone should have it, while local NTP is much higher on the autism spectrum.

 

[Toilet Paper]

Alright guys, I need some input: FreeBSD or OpenBSD? Gut says OpenBSD cause no CoC cancer and much higher focus on cleanliness & security, but then FreeBSD is bigger, has more packages, and is allegedly easier to configure and troubleshoot. I have never used a BSD system before, so thoughts & advice are appreciated. The host machine will be an X230, which I'm pretty sure should have good hardware support for both.

OpenBSD is more focused on security, so you're gonna have to do things like enable simultaneous multi-threading (off by default) to get a reasonable desktop experience. All BSDs have good documentation though so it'll probably just be a matter of Reading The Friendly Manual.

As others have said, FreeBSD is closer to Linux. Unsure about the performance of Wi-Fi (cards?) on a X230, but using it on a semi-recent laptop resulted in very slow internet speeds.

The init system on both is just scripts, so they're a bit slow when it comes to booting. No complaints otherwise.

 

[AnOminous]

No need to come up with a hardware add-in to get it working, which is why having Pi-Hole is trivial and everyone should have it, while local NTP is much higher on the autism spectrum.

I can't see why you'd need your own atomic clock for it, though. Why not just use WWVB as the source for the NTP server? (It also has its own NTP server but if you're doing it locally presumably you have some specific reason for not wanting to use that.)

 

[GNU Abyss]

Y'all autistic

Wrong again, child. Enjoy GNOME prison.

 

[Vesperus]

Y'all autistic

It's our superpower, normie.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

But Wayland is removing the freedom of customizability and things a program can do

I wouldn't say that would be one of my criticisms of wayland. You can do as much customization as you could on x11. My criticism would be it doesn't have the ecosystem x11 does still. Not really too surprising since its only now that people are actually starting to move over. And because it doesn't have the ecosystem still, you end up running into things you can't do with it people were able to with x11.

For myself. I actually don't have any problems running pure wayland, no xwayland. For me nothing I use is actually broken on wayland. And the x11 specific things I used I was able to replace with wayland native versions. Like all my dmenu scripts, things along those lines. I'm able to just move back and forth between x11 and wayland. Without any real issue, now that I've found everything I needed on the wayland side.

Alright guys, I need some input: FreeBSD or OpenBSD? Gut says OpenBSD cause no CoC cancer and much higher focus on cleanliness & security, but then FreeBSD is bigger, has more packages, and is allegedly easier to configure and troubleshoot. I have never used a BSD system before, so thoughts & advice are appreciated. The host machine will be an X230, which I'm pretty sure should have good hardware support for both.

If your hardware works with openbsd. Probably pick openbsd.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Wrong again, child. Enjoy GNOME prison.

oh god no