I firmly believe this will be the year of the Wayland Desktop. Everything is shaping up to finishing off the transition for regular people and further stabilisation of the Wayland desktop space.
As someone using Wayland on a HiDPI screen it’s not a great experience with legacy apps. You can’t completely rely on application-controlled scaling since not all apps support it and if you switch to system-wide scaling everything looks like crap.
Which apps? I’ve discovered recently Electron apps can enable Wayland support with a command line argument.
Just last time it was free:ac; I had to change to system scaling because it would be unreadable otherwise, and that in turn fucked up Steam that I had managed to configure properly before.
But isn’t that still on par with xorg where you can’t have any fractional scaling?
To be fair I haven’t tried. But I believe even at 2x scaling it looked like shit.
*every application using xWayland looks like crap.
Native Wayland apps work great with fractional scaling.
- java ( @java@beehaw.org ) 3•1 year ago
I don’t understand this fetish. Every day I read about problems people have with Wayland, while I’ve been using X for the past 15 years without any issues.
Wayland is better at segmenting each app. On X any app could potentially see/record what happen on the entire screen while on Wayland that requires you do manually grant the rights. Similar to how macOS is requesting you to give each app the possibility to record your screen or not.
- java ( @java@beehaw.org ) 1•1 year ago
That’s an improvement. But
risk = impact * probability. Realistically, the probability of installing such an app from repos is virtually non-existent. My point is that Wayland comes with some improvements, but I’ve been seeing comments like the one I replied to for almost 15 years, as if Wayland will revolutionize Linux desktop. It won’t. Probably most users won’t see any difference, except for bugs caused by the migration.The probability of abuse is much higher with closed-source applications though. Almost all popular games are closed-source, and many are riddled with ads and spyware.
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 4•1 year ago
I have been using X since 1992 with lots of issues. I do not understand the fetish with X11 and why people cling to it so tightly.
- java ( @java@beehaw.org ) 2•1 year ago
If that was true, we would be on Wayland for years. But in reality, it proves minor improvements versus heavy investments to migrate from X. And that’s why it’s still a fetish and not a standard.
No no, this year for real! Because (highly technical reason that doesn’t affect most users).
For real though, how Microsoft plays this year could be interesting considering the lukewarm reception to Win11 and the impending ewaste pile of Win10.
Especially if Win12 is cloud-based, like the rumors say, I could see a potential influx of Linux users
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 9•1 year ago
Not sure this is the year but my “highly technical reason” is that enough gamers switch.
Microsoft plays just like it has always played - with OEM contracts and being the default OS choice. Linux remains niche as long as Microsoft has this, unless they decide to roll out a mainstream distro themselves.
Sure, but I’m getting the feeling there’s a bit of dissent in Windows users, with many vowing never to use Windows 11. If MS keep making user hostile or even just user neutral decisions and Linux starts gaining a reputation of being easy to install, we could see people trying Linux rather than upgrading to Win 11.
Of course, I doubt MS is going to let that happen. They’re either going to walk back some of the egregious privacy violations or do a Google and prevent you from installing alternatives.
More techy people migrating to linux would be good, but that won’t change the fact that most people don’t even know that they can change their os, let alone how to do it.
More techy people joining would mean that we would hopefully get more fixes to issues linux has, as there would be more people bringing attention to them and maybe there would also be more people willing to help fix them.
When those issues are fixed, we might get to step two. Honestly not even sure what that step would be, but maybe it could be that more it-departments switch over to linux, which would get more people familiar with it, which would hopefully make manufacturers more likely to ship computers with linux.
All that is going to take a hell of a lot of time. And honestly seems unlikely to happen in the next 10, heck even 20 years. People are already so used to Microsofts shenanigans that they would have to fuck up majorly to get enough people to switch that it would matter. People are lazy, for good and bad, and as long as Windows at least mostly works fine, they’ll just be stuck using it.
Maybe we’ll climb to 4% marketshare!
Here’s to another year of the Linux Desktop! (been ~15 years for me) 🎉
It will be a pleasure, like every other year of the Linux Desktop™ for more than 20 years now! :-)
Year of the chromeOS desktop maybe, may faith is low
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 2•1 year ago
I have seen stats that both Linux and ChromeOS have around 3.5% market share.
If ChromeOS continues to converge with proper desktop Linux, I consider it a distro which makes 10%+ possible this year.
The wild card for me is Linux gaming. It may not grow fast but it totally could.
Which had me wondering for the first time I hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop”, what percentage do we have to hit for this to be the year?
I don’t really expect us to hit it but, for the first time, I feel like it is possible.
Which had me wondering for the first time I hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop”, what percentage do we have to hit for this to be the year?
Imo it’s more of a list of things that need to happen, like some mainstream games, apps and devices getting 1st-party Linux support. I suspect this to start happening around the 20% mark, but ofc that’s just a guess.
I think the 1st-party device support is a little trickier on Linux than on Windows, which IMHO hampers the widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop.
The reason it’s trickier is that the Linux kernel has no stable API or ABI — which is ultimately a good thing ( https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/stable-api-nonsense.rst ), but for closed source drivers presents a problem.
Have you guys fixed your graphics stack to keep up with current High-DPI and HDR displays yet? No? LOL happy new year of the eyesore desktop to you too
