I’m curious what folks make of the Xorg drama that was recently discussed on various outlets? For those not aware, here is an intro video by Luduke about it.
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There is already a thread where it is being discussed:
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Ahh, didn’t see that. Thanks!
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More corporate driven fragmentation…I remember a time when Linux (primarily Ubuntu) was gaining huge ground and then Gnome3 happened. It threw them into desktop chaos that they never really recovered from.
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I’m totally confused. A few years ago people were saying that X11 wasn’t secure and that we should start using Wayland, but then Wayland wasn’t considered powerful enough to replace X11. Now, with things that have happened over the last few days, I’m wondering what the real deal is. I’m using OM w/Wayland now and haven’t really had any problems.
I’d like to hear someone chime in that could really give some clues as to the why suddenly Wayland is being shoved down everyone’s throat, and should I go back to X11?
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It isn’t sudden. Wayland has been around a long time. The problem seems to be a belief that if only we drag our feet about porting our apps to Wayland, X11 must continue, and in practice it’s not working that way. X11 has been functionally dead-ended for 13 years now, and has significant design-architecture issues, which is why Wayland is where all the X11 devs went.
That said, I’m glad XLibre happened (maybe it needed this little uproar to bring it into existence) – there are going to be use cases that still need X11, and far better if that gets updated and known issues fixed than if it just moulders away until the day comes when it’s no longer compatible with anything halfway recent, including newer hardware. Which is exactly what was happening to X11.
Definitely worth a watch, from one of the X and Wayland devs:
The Real Story Behind Wayland and X - Daniel Stone (linux.conf.au 2013)
Myself, I don’t care one way or the other so long as my desktop is stable, but it’s been plain for some time that like it or not, Wayland is the future for the majority of the linux ecosystem. And for my chosen distros – they’ve all switched to Wayland and if I didn’t fire up InfoCenter and check, I wouldn’t have noticed.
I do remember when Wayland was all screen tearing and no picture; it is much better now, and I’ve had no trouble with it. But I also remember when X11 was so slow that you could literally watch it drawing on the screen one pixel at a time (and the above video somewhat explains why). A lot of X11’s issues on the desktop are masked by the hugely-improved performance of modern hardware.
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who? nvidia on wayland is still but a $show.
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I have not found it so. Working fine here. 1070, and whatever random well-aged GPU was in the parts bin. Which one is giving you trouble?
What I have had trouble with is some of the Radeon R7 family – one works, another of same model with slightly different chipset does not (resolution limited to 1024x768).
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I’ve got a 3080 and its been a $show. I could not get OpenMandriva,Nobara,Devuan Excalibur, OpenSUSE TW, PoP_OS, or even the newest Kubuntu to play nice so currently I am running TuxedoOS with my frankenstein install of KDE-NEON as a dualboot backup.
I do have to give Tuxedo credit, that “just worked” out of the box, clicked Advanced>Wayland and no probs. In everyone else’s defense Tuxedo spends alot of time & money getting it to that point for their pre-builts & laptops whereas all volunteer projects don’t have the resources.
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I haven’t tried Tuxedo, but yeah, that’s an advantage.
Neon was nice until I rebooted, and then it wouldn’t let me log in!
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NEON is not really meant to be ran as a daily driver. Its really meant to just showcase “This is where KDE is right now”. Tuxedo bases on Ubuntu LTS and parts of NEON but they do a bunch of QA and tweak the kernel and drivers etc. No joke it live booted, auto detected and ran the nvidia 560 driver all without asking, then it let me pick wayland which ran fine, installed and boom…done.
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Tuxedo must be doing something right. 
Yeah, I’ve heard that about Neon, even so I expected it to run longer than once. But that does KDE no favors – if it doesn’t run stable, KDE gets the blame, and no one will care about the showcase. It’s not like the rest of us are waiting years for the latest features!
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And so many who use Plasma wonder why KDE has such a poor reputation for usability and stability, despite using it every day.
Yeah. Eight years now and I’ve had exactly zero trouble with KDE anything, yet I hear how terrible it is… The showcase distro needs to be Plasma at its very best, not its bleeding-out edge. Experimental is fine but it needs to be clearly identified as such.
Here is an example of experiment gone Duck Amuck. The “Auto Pilot” function on the Tesla. Definitely not ready for anyone except the experimenters. Keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention to where you are going, and it works as intended. But most “drivers” take their hands off the wheel and start texting. Tesla still refuses to label “Auto Pilot” as experimental, not ready for daily use, or something like that. Or when corporate ego surpasses the corporate legal department.
That is what KDE needs to do with Neon. Download and install it if you want. Just don’t be too surprised when something doesn’t work or goes sideways. Clearly labeled as “experimental” or “extreme bleeding edge desktop environment features” would go a long way towards eliminating the Reddit posts about how Plasma is unstable and unusable.
“Duck Amuck.” I am showing my age, am I not? Cue the music, “Merry Go Round Broke Down.” The good old days of educational television, when kids like me were taught to not play with gravity.
My inner control freak doesn’t even like Cruise Control. If they think I’m letting the car do the steering… I do wonder how it responds to deer on the road, or worse, deer beside the road.
Absolutely.
Another problem is that people tend to blame the desktop, not the distro. I’ve found the distro underneath largely dictates how well the desktop works, especially how well it performs. (Hint: if you want good performance, don’t start with freakin’ Ubuntu.) What I really don’t understand is now an experimental release gets preinstalled on hardware intended to be sold…
LOL, I didn’t know the thing had words…
I wish someone had made that information public when I switched from Windows 10 to Kubuntu a few years ago.
Search YouTube for “Merry Go Round Broke Down Eddy Duchin” for the original words.
For both Daffy Duck versions of the words, search again, this time “Every Time The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down Was Used in Classic Looney Tunes (excluding intro/outros).”
Volo Museum in Volo, Illinois has a Wurlitzer doing the job. Trouble is, the video’s audio quality doesn’t do justice. It sounds much better in person. On YouTube again, search for “Wurlitzer 157 Band Organ Plays The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down.”
pretty sure this stems from the shit show that was kde4, it was considered so bad that they forked kde3.5 and created trinity desktop https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
I found this one, it sounds pretty good. It sure is a beautiful instrument. – Somewhat safer than the Wurlitzer of Wisdom. 
I could never get early Ubuntu to run. More recently… even on modern hardware, why is this thing so slow? then tried Mint (at the time 17 or 18), and it ran 4x faster. Why? Mint loaded (by actual count) 1/4th as much junk as concurrent Ubuntu. Now I wouldn’t touch the big U, because I loathe Gnome. If that was the only DE, Win10 (which propelled me into linux) suddenly looks a lot better.
Kubuntu always struck me as the unloved poor relation. It ran better than default Ubuntu, but seemed like everything was just a little slapdash. I’ve been told nowadays it’s more its own thing.
I ran Trinity for a while. I like it (not least because it’s as close to the WinXP UI as linux gets) but kept banging into little glitches and eventually gave it up. I need to look at the latest release and see how it’s going.
PCLinuxOS’s “FullMonty” community release used a customized KDE4, and it ran perfectly. Really neat setup, and at least by when I arrived (2015) had no issues at all. (Unfortunately changes in KDE5 meant it couldn’t continue. Someone built a near-miss with KDE5, but it didn’t quite fly.) Given our KDE4 was so trouble-free, gotta wonder how many of the shitshows were half-assed implementations because maintainers were mad about the changes. I remember when KDE5 came along there was similar screeching, but I never had any trouble with it. And now KDE6, here we go again!
I used KDE4-for-Windows and it was generally okay (some stuff didn’t work, but on Windows I still keep Okular installed because of it). Also, KDE-for-Win is portable – you can drag the whole mess from one PC to the next and it still works.
That’s the one. Not shown in the video is the carousel behind the camera. The room is filled with a carousel in the center, surrounded by assorted band organs hooked up to token boxes. Buy tokens at the token dispenser machine. Put a token in the token box and the band organ starts playing. This requires coordination by the visitors. Only one band organ at a time should play, or it ruins the entire atmosphere inside the building. Too bad the owners of the museum didn’t rig it, so only one at a time is allowed to play, and the rest go into the cue in the order of being fed a token.
Most people don’t understand how a band organ works. In back, it is fed a long roll of what I would call “paper tape.” A long sheet of paper with holes punched in, with each hole position used to tell the machine which instrument’s note to play and for how long. When I worked in the tool and die shop 40 years ago, we used a similar system, but in 8-bit ASCII/ISO 840 code to represent numbers and letters. Knowing how it works does eliminate the “magic.”
Kubuntu is becoming more of its own thing. To the point where Ubuntu shipped out the last few upgrades, but they crashed and burned the Kubuntu DE until it those upgrades been repaired by the Kubuntu maintainers. I am convinced the deletion of the components required for Plasma 6 was intentional. If someone from Canonical wants to prove me wrong, go for it. Thankfully, I always waited a month or two before installing the latest upgrade. Let someone else find out how Canonical is becoming as evil as Microsoft.
I am led to believe Canonical wants Kubuntu gone because Kubuntu does everything possible to give the user options to the Canonical dogma. As an example, with Ubuntu, Snap packages are mandatory but with Kubuntu, Snap packages are optional.
As for speed, Kubuntu is slower than OM, but still way faster than Ubuntu and lighter on resources, despite the ability for the user to make all kinds of tweaks, adjustments, and theming to Plasma while in Gnome, this level of fine-tuning is just a pipe dream.