With all the bleating about how GNOME does not listen to users, these kinds of little quality of life improvements may be more significant than you think. Let’s hope we see more of them.

Everything runs under Wayland. That should be your default expectation.

At this point, Wayland is the preferred environment for GTK and Qt apps. Unless the app is exploiting some specific aspect of X11, all GTK (3 and up) and Qt (5 and up) apps work fine under Wayland.

As for other toolkits, FLTK, Electron, and SDL apps run in Wayland too.

And by “preferred”, I mean that these apps (like Thunar) will run natively on Wayland even if Xwayland is available.

There are Wayland only toolkits now but not really any “modern” toolkits that do not support Wayland. When Thunar gets ported to GTK5, it will be Wayland only.

Obviously ancient x11 specific stuff like XCB or Athena, and things built on them like Motif will require Xwayland or Xsatellite. So if you want to run, xv or motif nedit, you need those. This list includes GTK2 as well. But even they work well enough you may not notice. I mean, xeyes won’t track your mouse I guess.

And just in case mentioning xeyes brings out the Wayland critics, you can build an xeyes app that works in Wayland. I think the Wayland Maker compositor project has one for example (WindowMaker in Wayland).

Yes. There is also a GCC front-end for Rust (does not go to C first).

The timeline is not super abrupt, especially for architectures where all he is asking is to ensure that your Rust toolchain is in order. That is especially true when you consider that Rust is already well maintained on all the Debian architectures that people actually use.

The abruptness (almost rudeness) is in the second part where he basically says that, if you cannot get Rust going in time, you should just stop releasing Debian for that architecture.

It is mostly just poorly worded though. Because none of these architectures have “official” support even now. This will not be the only way they are behind. So, there is not reason to be so dramatic.

And that would be my response to him. Another option here is that these alternative architectures just continue to ship an older version of APT for now. Emergency avoided. Few of them ship with up-to-date versions of APT even now.

Another solution is to use one of the multiple projects that is working to make Rust code build with the GCC compiler back-end. At least one of these projects has already announced that they want to work with these Debian variants to ensure that APT builds with them.

So, the 6 month timeline is a reasonable impetus to make that happen which would be quite a good thing beyond just APT.

There are many other useful tools written in Rust you are going to want to use on these architectures. It will be a fantastic outcome if this pressure from APT kickstarts that happening for some of these long abandoned architectures (by the mainstream at least).

Rust is generally not going to outperform well optimized C code.

That said, it is far easier to write performant Rust code than C code. So, what we see, is that projects that move to Rust frequently see performance gains.

That just means the initial C code was not that great (performance wise). From observation, most C projects are fairly unoptimized.

There is this really strange perception amongst Wayland critics that it had low market share and nobody was using it.

The majority of Linux desktop users are on Wayland and we still have people posting that nobody is using it or even that it “doesn’t work”.

Wayland switched to the default in places where it was already popular and is becoming required in places where few are switching away from the default.

Until X11 has all the features that Wayland has, X11 people should stop bragging about it.

You are the one preaching and yelling.

Stay on X if you want. As you say, that is the freedom Open Source provides. I use ancient hardware. To each their own. If I was still using XFCE, I would still be using X myself*.

But if you are going to voluntarily stay behind, stop complaining that the bus left without you.

Wayland users are in the majority. By the time Mint (Cinnamon) flips to Wayland (2026?) and GTK5 is released (2028?) it will be over 90%. Almost all GNOME and Plasma users are Wayland now and that must be 60% already (without even counting Hyprland, Sway, COSMIC, or Niri).

We already have Wayland only distros (eg. RHEL10). GNOME will not even be the first Wayland only DE (COSMIC). The ship has sailed.

• I have one box that uses XFCE on Wayland but if I wanted to use XFCE as my main desktop, I would probably use X. My daily drivers are Niri and Plasma Wayland.

It is pretty hard to improve if you are not allowed to change anything.

Yes, the design of Wayland means that some of the techniques that work on X will not work on Wayland (on purpose). So yes, some apps have to be adapted to use the techniques that do work on Wayland. And no, changing Wayland to support the old ways is not the answer (because they were changed on purpose).

Wayland has been criticized for taking away previous capabilities before providing new ways to do things. That is a fair critique, though somewhat par for the course when replacing old tech. But at this point, almost everything necessary is possible and Wayland users are in the majority (the massive majority soon).

At this point, it really is the apps developers responsibility to support Wayland properly. I mean, they do not have to of course but that means their app will be broken for 80% of Linux users on two years (and more than half today).

Because CEOs in general lean pretty right?

Always remember: Linux is about choice

That is one of the advantages of Linux. Let’s not let it be a liability.

When coming to Linux, it is about “taking that first step”. If you are coming from something else, any distro is a positive move and they are much more alike than they are different (compared to the OS you are coming from). So, start with something safe. I do not use Mint but it is an awesome choice.

Once you learn more about Linux and about what you like, you will learn that you have 1000 choices. Once you know the difference and know which once suits you, you can switch. At that point, you will find switching easy.

The idea that people “have to choose” at the beginning holds many people back.

Any of Mint, PopOS, Fedora, or Ubuntu would serve a new user just fine. I recommend Mint because the UX is familiar to Windows users, it is “batteries included”, and it is conservative (stable). But the others are great too.

Really looking forward to seeing where COSMIC goes now that they have the basics in place. It could really give Plasma and GNOME a run for their money.

As a Niri user, I am also very thankful for the maturity that COSMIC is driving in projects like Smithay.

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AerynOS seems to be ok though. Tune Morling (erno) seems to be very active in their repos and he is the current project lead.

I mean, we will see. I guess it is still in Alpha.

Agree. Here is a different take.

Unity was created by a corporation with massive resources. It was abandoned when that corporation changed its priorities. If proprietary, Unity would have died long ago.

Due to the efforts of a 10 year old volunteer, it was fully modernized and became quite popular again, offered in many distros. The lifetime of Unity as a project has already been extended by years. A 10’tear old kid. That is the power of Open Source.

The main contributor is not able to work on Unity right now. Others can take up the effort, because it is Open Source. That includes any user or group of users that live or rely on it. The opportunity is available to anyone.

Absolute worst case, the world already got more Unity than it would have. And it could be revived at any time.

Distrobox solves a great many problems. I use it in Cachy all the time.

Also, I am not sure what security Podman under Distrobox is making worse. Got an example?

You are suggesting Flatpaks for security? Um. Ok.

And how is calling the entire Freedesktop platform just to run an app better than the much more limited dependencies that Distrobox will pull in? And, if I already use Podman, Flatpak is a lot of extra complexity compared to Distrobox.

Exactly! Keeps the core clean. I use use Arch distroboxes on Arch or EOS for exactly this reason.

Distrobox changed the way I use Linux. I cannot imagine going back.

First, you are exactly right that it allows you to separate app repo from the rest of what you live about a distro.

I use an Arch Distrobox with every machine. Using Chimera Linux that uses MUSL, Clang, libc++, and BSD userland? Install anything from the Arch repos or AUR in seconds.

But it is not just package repo size. Using an app that targets RHEL? Install it from a RHEL Distrobox.

Doing dev for a project whose users are Ubuntu people? Build it in an Ubuntu Distrobox.

Want to try something and do not want it to mess up your system? Do it in a Distrobox.

Need some software for a class that will just be cluttering up your system after? Make a Distrobox for that class.

I have a .NET Distrobox. I have a Java Distrobox. Just not having to update the IDE and frameworks all the time is a huge win.

Mature application that I use every day that I do not want to change or break on me? Install from a Debian Distrobox.

Rapidly developing app where I want the latest for features and fixes? Install from an Arch Distrobox.

Tools you like that only Mint offers? Install a Mint Distrobox.

Distrobox is the greatest.

I love Debian. Literally the worst possible choice for GPU drivers.

This was widely anticipated