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Who said Wayland was going to be the death? (Excluding canonical) Everyone knew X needed to be replaced and that the transition will be slow until its not.
And systemd is not that bad these days. I do think it's more complex than it needs to be and startup is a bit slow, but that's about it.
GNOME making the huge changes inspired the refugees to build Cinnamon and injected some sense into KDE development. Now even GNOME is getting more sensible.
I saw someone giving a talk either about Wayland and they said someone told them they "don't like Wayland because it violates the Unix philosophy." (Do one thing and do it well.) The speaker said they responded by asking "What one thing does X do well?"
systemd is not that bad these days
It never was bad, in fact it was better than the alternatives even in it's beta releases.
I sure as f don't miss x, but for the fing love of God can I get some access at the shell level to my input devices? The death of Autohotkey is killing me slowly.
It's probably countered by the "year of the Linux desktop" claims. Keeps it in a limbo.
I like systemd
Systemdeez nuts
Most people do
There are places I wouldn't use it but for most systems it makes things simpler
OOL: whatβs the beef with systemd?
I'll just copy my comment from the other day.
Some people think it handles too many low-level systems. It's a valid concern because if systemd itself were to become compromised (like Xz Utils was) or a serious bug was introduced, all of the userland processes would be affected. People who are stuck in the 90s and think that the Unix philosophy is still relevant will also point out that it's a needlessly complex software suite and we should all go back to writing initscripts in bash. The truth is, it's complex because it needs to solve a complex problem.
Red Hat, the owner of systemd, has also had its fair share of controversies. It's a company that many distrust.
Ultimately, those whose opinion mattered the most decided that systemd's benefits outweigh the risks and drawbacks. Debian held a vote to determine the project's future regarding init systems. Arch Linux replaced initscripts because systemd was simply better, and replicating and maintaining its features (like starting services once their dependencies are running) with initscripts would've been unjustifiably complicated.
it does too many things, thus going against the unix philosopy of "do one thing and do it well"
Systemd does one thing, it manages services, and does so reliably, without messing around with spagettified shell scripts, with a fuckload of options, and all of that easily is configurable by dropping in files without editing stuff that arrived from the package manager. Seems pretti "do one (complex) thing and do it well"
If you add other things built around it, it can do more. For example, if you install systemd-nspawn it can start and stop containers like it starts and stops services.
Other things that you think of as systemd are entirely separate things (like systemd-networkd) that are just built around systemd. You don't have to use them if you don't like.
On the other hand, you know what does not follow the Unix philosophy? The Xserver, which manages screens, graphic acceleration, input devices, printers, remoting, etc. And it doesn't even do it well
I need systemd-run to start a process in my startup scripts (that are a systemd oneshot service) so that the process won't get killed when the startup scripts have run (subshells, nohup, ... still keep the same systemd cgroup so get killed with the tree).
I need journalctl to get output from services, so basically every system and user process I didn't explicitly start in a console. I don't even know how to get info from systemd stuff in any other way, as they don't have alternate logging facilities to my knowledge.
Systemd also ate my fstab at some point and translates mounts into services, but I haven't really looked into that.
I think there were a few more components packed into this systemd core. Without the init system/servixe manager, logging, ... you can't really use systemd stuff including parts of that core.
Past that, things like networkd, resolved, ... are very modular in my experience.
I can imagine running resolved under a different init system, and I have migrated both to and from resolved on systemd systems. They do still change old paradigms, resolved replaces a file not a service for example, but they do provide adequate translation layers and backwards compatibility in most cases (Though the mounts for example has lead to me getting 5 "run daemon-reload" info messages on every execution of mount before). An issue here might be when something only supports the new systemd interface not the old stuff, say a program directly calling resolved instead of looking at resolv.conf. But I haven't seen that, and most of those interfaces seem decent enough to implement into systemd-alternatives.
Maybe someome who actually tried cherrypicking some systemd stuff into their system can provide some more experience?
Shouldn't init systems control services and processes?
See also: the Linux Kernel
It's the first time I hear systemd or wayland were spelling the death of the linux desktop (not even gonna mention gnome, it's a choice).
There are controversies around these two, some extremely valid, some a bit over the top, but both do work adequately for the vast majority of common use cases. I'd even argue that systemd (the init process) is better as far as being user friendly. And I say "user", not "poweruser" nor "sysadmin". And wayland is an opportunity to clear some long-lasting backward stuff, and even though it is possible to find issue today, for regular (and new) users, it has no bearing on the usability of their system.
As a sysadmin I'll say systemd is far better. No contest.
Does anyone even use desktops anymore?
I do... and always will.
What? yes?
Fuck it, we CLI
According to this data, desktop devices still make well over 50% with over 75% in Europe.
Thatβs for desktops and laptops combined though, so doesnβt really answer. Iβm curious as everywhere I work transitioned to laptops and tablets since COVID.
Oh, translation mistake on my side. Is the word "desktop" really still in use for tower computers? π€ I only know it for the kind of computing, not the device type.
Anyway, can't quickly find proper statistics for that. I once read an estimate done by what I think was Valve, that's obviously scewed towards the gaming bubble though. Still, I think it "only" was about 50-60% desktops over laptops and "other". They won't vanish anytime soon though, you can't squeeze highest performance into a laptop and game streaming only works very selectively.
I'm really curious how it will shift in the future given Linux becomes more and more popular, and that ecosystem is already offering a synergy approach (not just the way SteamDeck does, but also with both GTK and Qt apps able to shift depending on display size and touch capabilities).
Do you mean as opposed to using phones/tablets, or do you mean like having a tower computer and peripherals? People still use laptops and stationary computers for work, like office work and computer related hobbies and anything like it. For doomscrolling and simple games, phones are more popular though.
Weβll, I mean as in desktop PCs. Iβm assuming the βYear of the Linux desktopβ thing is a joke that itβs been that long coming that people were still using desktops when people first started saying it.
Some people include laptops in "desktop" since it's the same paradigm of the interface, especially if you hook up an external mouse and have a regular screen and keyboard. Laptops are still widely used. Some people use the term workstation. If 90% of people used linux on laptops for browsing, writing, programming, editing media, spread sheets, etc, I'd say that was the year of Linux on the Desktop, even if they don't have a Compaq with a CRT screen sitting on their desk.
Maybe some people do that, but theyβre literally called βlaptopsβ to distinguish them from desktops.
Yes, well, such is language. What word better describes the combination of devices where you carry out typical desktop computer tasks in a desktop manner? I'm open for using a different word.
It's impressive how much hatred linux gets, by people who generally try to say it's insignificant and unnoticeable.
But eh, better them say that it's going to die, than with Windows where everyone agreed to say that it was dead after 7 and stopped having any expectations.
It's even more impressive how much hate Linux gets from people that love it
We call that "Star Wars Syndrome."
I don't quite get why massive Gnome changes would imply a death of Desktop Linux. There are so many great alternatives to it. It's been many years that Gnome has been considered bad by many, and that many have used alternatives. I just think it's positive that Gnome continue to get worse, because like that more distros may default to better alternatives to begin with.
I hated Gnome 3 when it came out, but it got better over the years. If you want to use it as a traditional KDE-style DE, you're going to fight it and have a bad time. If you use it as intended, and that works for you, it's good.
Gnome is awesome
It was somewhat of a special situation back when Gnome 3 dropped. Ubuntu & flavours of it was still regarded as the go-to distro by many and KDE still had a somewhat damaged reputation due to KDE 3 (even though 4 was already available, however that also had some issues). Many environments we know today didn't exist yet, so lots of people were rather distraught when Gnome broke with a lot of concepts and dropped what arguably was a horrendous DE.
Many of our current DEs are Gnome 2 or 3 forks (MATE, Cinnamon, Budgie, and back then also Unity), made exactly because of this whole debacle.
I never understood it either. I was a user of Gnome until Gnome 3 showed up and I decided to nope out of there. It was a simple process of trying few different DE's and I have settled on KDE and Cinnamon for when I want that old timey Gnome feeling.
It wasn't hard to switch at all.
Tried KDE in the early days, it was all over the place. Switched to gnome when it was baked. I had been gnome for years. Every update broke and replaced plugins to make it work like I wanted. I've had Windows layout since'95, I have to go back and forth a lot, so muscle memory is key.
After fucking with gnome for the 90th time. I tried KDE again, it was just layed out like I wanted. No plugins, no fucking with it. The worst thing I have to do is set dolphin not to open on single click.
I see people here going well if you don't take it as it comes you're going to have a bad time. That's pretty much the least Linux comment I've ever read. That's OSX in a nutshell.
Yeah, KDE was rough in the early days thanks to QT. But things slowly worked themselves out. While I don't change much with KDE, I do change a few minor things, mostly I make sure the capslock is off and single click to open is on and I got to have that 3D box to switch my desktops. But I do like the power of easy choice KDE offers.
Still I do get nostalgic for the old Gnome2 days. So I have Cinnamon DE installed on a low powered mini desktop. And it runs amazingly well.
I tried Cinnamon out in a live distro It was pretty pleasant. I find Nemo for more enjoyable than Dolphin.
I even liked Unity (so long as the icons weren't on the side).
I remember the reaction at the time and so many people hated it. I didn't dislike it, I was getting a bit into it.
Hot take: the more Gnome shoots itself in the foot, the better for Linux.
All is better than the shit MS is pulling, from mass surveilance on their "business" apps to making an OS with ads included that you have to spent hours to make it useful.
While Linux has many flavors that just works for 80% of the people that dont have super specific use cases.
