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.
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.
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.
Having run PostmarketOS on an old Samsung Galaxy tablet and now Arch on PineTab 2, Flatpak often works better than the native package manager. Especially with Wayland, many packages just work including touchscreen.
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.
I’ve been using Wayland for a while, and I’ve seen more bugs with my WMs than in my ~1000 hours of Deep Rock Galactic playtime
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
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Sway is essentially i3 + Wayland, so it shouldn’t be a hard switch once X11 goes EOL.
Flatpak packages still suck at integration without breaking something in the core app. They’re really great for bleeding edge and cross distro support tho.
Wayland still can’t do all the cool tricks X11 can, so it’s not like it’s really being forced upon anyone beyond X11 losing on potential major updates which is unlikely.
DEs are willing to switch to Wayland given that it is either equal or superior to X11 which is still not the case for several scenarios and applications.
Exactly my POV. Do all the things X11 can, and I have no problem switching whatsoever.
Why did no one had any issues switching from PulseAudio to PipeWire? Because it was simply better. It could do everything PulseAudio could, plus a lot more. It was backwards compatible (with plugins of course) and there were practically very little issues with it at the point at which distros and users decided to switch. It was a finished product.
Speak for yourself, I’ve had enough issues with both PulseAudio and PipeWire to abandon gaming on Linux which is a shame.
What exactly was wrong with PipeWire and gaming (Steam I presume)?
I don’t game, but I do music on Linux, use Ardour… sure, it requres some setting up, but far from anything super complicated.
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.
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.
If Windows users had to deal with the dependency issues, it likely would’ve never taken off. That’s kind of the problem I’ve seen around various Linux distros, though I wager it’s gotten a lot better in recent years. For the record, I’ve been out of the Linux game for a good 6 years, and I barely ever boot up my computer much. I’m able to run my business completely off my phone (except tax season), and I haven’t made the earnest effort to get back into it due to time constraints.
If Windows users had to deal with the dependency issues
Have you never heard the term “DLL Hell?” It’s called that because DOS and Windows specifically use
.dllfiles for dependencies.
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.
I suddenly have the urge to daily drive Hannah Montana Linux
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?
deleted by creator
There are other interesting ones here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Base_Directory
The one for steam turned into a bunch of memes because steam hasn’t even acknowledge it lol.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1890
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.
You literally will have the same dir but in a different location like ~/.local/flatpak/var. I don’t know why you like your home directory all dirty and filled with random stuff from random programs. There are .local, .config, .cache etc. dirs for a reason.
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.
Good thing the world is that simple, you’re completely correct. Nobody who could theoretically prevent something they don’t like is not entitled to their dislike, duh!
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!
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.
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.
Wayland is so much better than X. You don’t have to use it but its simplicity means most of the Linux community is going to.
What’s so much better about Wayland than X? I mean, I’m not really a fan of X and the security nightmare that it is, but as a user it’s all pretty plug and play these days. What does a normal user get out of Wayland? Would they even know they’re using it?
I’d love to try it, but it currently won’t work with some software I use, so I haven’t bothered… And honestly I’m kind of confused about how everybody is talking about how amazing Wayland is (and how it seems to suddenly be the one true path for a bunch of distros) when my only experience with Wayland is people talking about how great it is and then not being able to screenshare or whatever… Which doesn’t make it seem great from the outside? That maybe sounds a bit flippant, but I genuinely don’t understand why “normal” people are so excited? I mean, I can see people caring about features like HDR and maybe that’s easier to build into Wayland than ancient X11, but I’d be more excited about the specific feature than Wayland itself which may make implementing these things easier?
Wayland cuts out all of the dead features and allows content to be drawn to the screen more directly. This means that there is a simplified architecture with great battery life.
Other than that, it doesn’t really bring much to the table currently. Not everyone needs (or wants) HDR and many of the other features that I would like to have are still in the works, so… I don’t really see a reason to use it, at least not now.
The biggest feature of Wayland for me is mixed refreshrate monitors works OOB. On X this is a pain to get even remotely working and it’s impossible if your monitors aren’t dividable (120/60 works, 144/60 stutters).
This is from my experience something that is starting to be a way more common issue (high refreshrate laptops with 60 external monitors at businesses or high refreshrate monitor for gaming and a smaller secondary monitor for info lookup/discord).
other than that, Xorg does win the “more stable” prize for me, but if I wanted stability, I should’ve become a carpenter.
144/60 works fine for me on X. I only had to disable Vsync for the compositor. Games now run at full 144Hz on my main monitor, and the other two are running perfectly fine at 60Hz.
Though I’m still waiting for the day that I can finally make the jump to Wayland when nvidia support improves (or I have enough money for a new AMD GPU).
“I made that chair. It’s stable AF.”
😂😂😂
Support for HDR, variable refresh rate, direct draw and battery improvements sound like a very good list to have, other than the overall leaner build. You personally not caring about it doesn’t change the fact that it’s good to not stagnate when it comes to things like this.
VFR 🤨… I mean, does anyone actually use that? It flopped for video content, I seriously doubt anyone is gonna use that on a PC.
DirectDraw is an MS specific thing, part of DirectX. How does that fit into Wayland?
The second, I would actually LOVE to get in any frame server, X or Wayland, but that will most probably never happen.
Variable refresh rate has become the de facto standard of modern gaming now. They aren’t referring to the direct draw API, but the fact that Wayland does not have extra baggage to draw to the screen through a display server. Wayland just draws to the screen directly, saving time and performance.
VRR is fantastic for games, I really notice the difference and I use Wayland because of it.
The downside to that is (from my understanding) Wayland forces some form of Vsync on everything, so if you don’t have a VRR monitor then games can become very stuttery and have noticeable input lag. There is an option to “force lowest latency” which supposedly allows screen tearing for things like games, though I didn’t test how well it worked myself.
If people are interested in experimenting, then VRRTest is a great utility to see what VRR is doing and to test various settings.
Don’t you need a HDR monitor for HDR?
Yes, I believe so.
I don’t even want to know the price. I bought myself a new monitor for Christmas and I doubt it has that.
Mine are all standard as well, usually 10+ years old. I absolutely have no need for HDR, but I get that some people would like to use that.
Do
wmctrl,xdotooland similar work with it, and if not, what are their equivalents under Wayland?Wayland is a protocol so everything is implemented by the desktop.
First of all, X is not a security nightmare. There were 0 cases of someone getting hacked because of X exploit. It’s a FUD.
Now Wayland is a fad (haha). It’s not that much better than X and when it was drafted 10 years ago everyone just ignored it. Over the decade it became clear that X is stuck and at some point it will become obsolete so people started looking at alternatives and Wayland started getting some traction. Over time different tools started getting Wayland support, some people started getting exited about it and a kind of new meme developed where using Wayland meant that you’re ahead of everyone else (just like using Arch BTW). In the end it’s just a nice PR stunt. Ask people what specifically is so great about Wayland and they will mention some obscure features most people don’t need and features that it will have ‘soon’. In the long term the move will hopefully be a good thing but as of now if you don’t specifically need the few features it has you can keep ignoring it.
There are some really major deficiencies in Xorg that aren’t present in Wayland. The main one that made me switch was proper support for variable refresh rate, and the ability to mix and match any fixed or variable refresh rate displays you want.
It’s a super common use case to have a primary monitor with high refresh rate and VRR, plus one or two cheaper monitors that don’t. Xorg doesn’t really support that at all without some really hokey tricks that severely impede usability.
Proper sync support is another one. Yes, you can set tearfree in X but the implementation is crap. You’ll still get tearing in a lot of programs and at least in my experience, it introduces a pretty significant and perceptible input lag, far more than needed to eliminate tearing.
It’s a super common use case to have a primary monitor with high refresh rate and VRR, plus one or two cheaper monitors that don’t. Xorg doesn’t really support that at all without some really hokey tricks that severely impede usability.
I wish Wayland shills would stop spreading this lie. It literally just works. In fact, I’m doing it now on my laptop with a 144Hz 1080p monitor, and an external 60Hz 1440p monitor connected with Thunderbolt, with a dual-GPU setup (iGPU + nVidia, which Wayland doesn’t properly support, yet this is nVidia’s fault somehow even though Wayland compositors run entirely in user space, without interacting with the driver directly).
That’s why it doesn’t make sense arguing about it with Wayland fans. They always find this one obscure feature that X is missing and then claim it’s absolutely essential for everyone to have it. Most people have just one monitor, two equal/similar monitors, a handheld device with one screen or (and that’s the vast majority) simply don’t give a fuck that one of their monitors is working on a lower refresh rate. I’m glad Wayland finally found some traction with gamers obsessed with those things and is being adopted but the constant BS about everyone needing it is getting boring.
Mixed VRR is not an obscure feature for one. Most of my friends with gaming rigs have a primary monitor with VRR and use their old fixed rate monitors as secondary displays. Does it make a massive difference to run fixed refresh rate? No but it is noticeable and nice to have. Windows can do it and I paid for the hardware. Without parity on this kind of stuff, Linux is a hard sell to the people who do care about it.
Does it matter to Joe Schmoe? Probably not, but Joe Schmoe probably doesn’t care about Linux to begin with. You have to go for the tech enthusiasts first before you can get it to the masses.
1.6% of gamers use Linux. 25% of developers use Linux. Typical tech enthusiast is not gamer. Just because in your bubble people use VRR doesn’t mean it’s important to majority of users. Most Linux users don’t care.
Well explained 👍.
One of my favorite features: no tearing when watching movies.
Here’s the sad truth that Wayland haters hate: Wayland is way more performant and streamlined. X11 is an overly patched mess.
Everytime I had to install a distro, EVERYTIME I had to do some textfile hacking to avoid screen tearing with X11. Turns out in Wayland that is a virtually impossible bug.
Forget about making touchscreens work properly in X11, specially with a secondary screen.
I also remember all the weird bugs that appear in X11 when you have 2 screens with different scaling. No issue at all with Wayland.
Pretty basic stuff in any modern setup.
Wayland performs perfectly on platforms like KDE Plasma or Gnome. I miss no feature. It just requires that some propietary apps realise its potential. And that is what is already happening and will happen throughout 2024.
Sure, if you call “simplicity” to literally not doing anything so that every coder has to implement the graphics stack on every program on their own.
Well no, its handled by the desktop and libraries.
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
Yes -flatpak. I’m not a big fan. It’s nice though
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.
Systemd makes it easier for distro devs to write new services and test them, and makes it less likely for those services to have bugs. The systemd project also provides many daemons that improve the quality of a distro, such as journald, systemd-boot, systemd-resolved, and systemd-timedate. Systemd is making it easier for small distros, not harder.
I’ve ran into so many problems with systemd, that I just avoid it now. You do one thing and expect that to reflect on whatever you think it should reflect to, and it doesn’t. Why? Some systemd thing does this or that and it doesn’t let the message through. Ah, but you have an exception list for that. OK, cool, add to exception list, still doesn’t work 😒. Turns out, that exception list thingie is like in beta (for as long as systemd exists), and it doesn’t really work… well, at least not most of the time.
Not to mention various errors, daemons not responding (for god knows what reason), things being incredibly slow (compared to non-systemd based distros)… I just gave up, that is not a finished product from my POV.
I use Void now with runit, couldn’t be happier ☺️. Everything just works. If it doesn’t, it’s probably my fault.
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.
