So even longer than Duke Nukem Forever. Or Perl6/Raku/The Language Formerly Known As 'Meh.'

"...the Linux world in general was going to stop complaining and just accept systemd"

That might be an overstatement.

I'm looking at distros as I am considering moving from my current distro due to some sort of weird compatibility problems, and from what I see there are a lot of distros still, blissfully, systemd free. That, and judging from a lot of the comments here and on other sites, although the volume of complaints may have moderated, they are still being expressed.

It may be that the part of the Linux community that is more receptive to systemd are the developers and maintainers. Even so the fact that there are distros actively avoiding incorporating systemd shows that not even all of these people have been assimilated.

That might be is an overstatement.

There you go.

... volume of complaints may have moderated, they are still being expressed.

Moderated because (becoming wise to what systemd is) most of those complaining probably moved on to a systemd-less distribution.

Because, who in their right mind wants that crap in their OS?

... more receptive to systemd are the developers and maintainers.

Yes.

Incredible as it may seem, that may well be so.

There is a lot of moolah behind the push to systemd.

Where is the author of that abortion of nature working today?

Me?

Would not have systemd in my box unless hell freezes over, three times in a row.

.

Why does the desktop need to be updated every 5 minutes anyway other than bug fixes? It's mostly change for change's sake. Or change, to piss off the user in the case of GNOME.

Well with both Wayland and SystemD it's because the foundations are crumbling with age. (I'm told, not a system developer myself.) That would explain why the devs are so keen to push the changes.

Whether either of them is the right way to fix that is up for debate.

It's less that the foundations are crumbling, and more that change is happening on the hardware side of things.

If we had stability in that software didn't become more bloated and resource hungry, and new programming and application paradigms didn't keep appearing, then the existing tools would work fine forever.

But change is happening. More powerful systems, with more and different cores, more memory, more network bandwidth, and new storage designs appear, and existing software needs to change to accommodate this. I don't thing anybody thought when Linux was first being written, that we would have the monster 64 bit systems with multi-gigabyte RAM and terrabyte disks.

What is happening here is that the new, young things doing the programming don't want to learn legacy, they want the new, shiny, and feel that re-inventing the wheel rather than just changing the tyres is the way to go.

Sometimes you must reinvent the wheel. Would you run a Ferrari on Boudica's chariot wheels?

Someone converted a Tesla to run on [1]Wagon Wheels

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq5Q1qKW-1g

Funny. Being a Brit, my first though was [1]these ones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagon_Wheels

Mine too - I had to double check I'd got right name

I think I saw that video when it first came out. Watching it again though, I'm sure the wheels look smaller now.

I suspect downvoting is from non-Brit failing to understand the wagonwheels-are-smaller-these-days reference

I do think that X11 and linux GUIs from the early 2000s would compare more to 50's cars wheels than a chariot's. Old and showing its age? Definitely. Not ideal? Possibly. But not different enough as to be incompatible

Old and showing its age? Definitely.

Guilty as charged, but I like XFCE.

I get that for certain aspects of the system. But is the desktop really being updated because of new memory, storage devices, numbers of cores, etc? I'll have to take your word for it, since I'm ignorant of the innards but I'm surprised.

It's the display technologies rather than the CPU/memory stuff. e.g. High DPI, colour technologies, hardware acceleration, higher refresh rates, etc.

High DPI

High DPI wouldn't have been a problem if a) application programmers had asked the X server about pixel density like they were supposed to and b) X.org hadn't subsequently wired the server to 96 dpi even if it was running on a 200+ dpi display. The number of times I've had to fight bloody Firefox & Thunderbird to get properly sized controls because they've changed the scaling mechanism yet again for no good reason. Rant, fume!

Sometimes it's as simple as, "If I knew we were headed here then I wouldn't have started there."

It's not really memory or CPU in the case of the display system (I was talking in a more general sense), but hardware wise, the actual display hardware also changes, and is continuing to change rapidly.

The people doing the the most promising Linux port to Apple M1 and M2 hardware have said that they do not have enough resource to both re-write the X.org backend display driver for the new silicon, and also do a Wayland compositor. So they've opted to just do Wayland. And Apple never have done a native X11 driver for their display silicon fro MacOS, so are not going to do one now.

Unfortunately, the different vendors of display hardware all do it their own way, and are developing their own silicon, with different numbers of cores and basic graphic primitives, different levels of abstraction for higher graphics operations and even different ways to send the commands to the display hardware. And they don't keep it the same over time. New cards from Nvidia, AMD, Intel et.al. just don't work with the old drivers, and keeping up with the changes if the vendors themselves don't do it is very difficult for community development projects, especially if the specs. aren't published by the vendors.

This is, unfortunately, the way things will go forward, and an indication that Linux is moving further and further away from being a UNIX-like OS to being something distinct from it.

"What is happening here is that the new, young things doing the programming don't want to learn legacy, they want the new, shiny, and feel that re-inventing the wheel rather than just changing the tyres is the way to go."

Unless they learn the legacy first they won't know that which they're reinventing is supposed to do. That means there's little chance that their reinvention will do it. Then stuff breaks and they don't care because they don't know that caring was necessary.

Every time I try Wayland (as recently as this quarter, both Fedora and Debian KDE) things don’t work. For now, I’ve retreated into tiling-WM-land (StumpWM is very nice) and as it stands now, it’s gonna take a forcing action like, say, Firefox going Wayland-only before I consider it again.

In my experience this is because people keep fiddling with stuff.

My ancient AMD graphics card worked fine for years. Then someone changed something (probably something completely pointless for that card, like 3D ray tracing) and now I am in 1024x800 mode.

Another weekend of debugging!

You had to update the device driver, didn't you?

Both AMD and Nvidia retire the drivers for old cards. Chances are your card is no longer in the AMD universal driver, and you're back in un-accelerated VESA mode. Reinstall the old driver and pin it so that it doesn't get upgraded, or switch to the open drivers.

it’s gonna take a forcing action like, say, Firefox going Wayland-only before I consider it again

If that happens I'll finally get round to customising luakit to match my tastes (presuming WebKit hasn't stopped supporting X).

And that is the proper definition of a GUI, not to mention an OS.

It's not supposed to be in your face, it's what you're working on that is.

I keep hearing about fractional scaling and suchlike, but what I really want to know is this:

On a technical level, is there anything stopping a window manager or compositor from freely scaling windows independently of each other? I've wanted this for a long time - and I think it was kind-of-possible using Compiz (something else that's on life-support, if even that.).

Basically, what I want this is:

When, say, a calculator app (i.e. something non-resizable) is using an unreasonably large amount of screen space, I want to hit a key combination (or hold down a key and roll the mouse wheel) and have just that one app shrunk by 10%. Shrunk, not resized - as far as the app's concerned nothing's changed - instead the window manager / compositor is just presenting a shrunken view of the window, and transforming input events accordingly.

Likewise, found an app with unreadably tiny text? Hit a key combination to resize the application to, say, 75% of the screen size, then scale the smaller window up so it fills the screen. (On high-DPI displays - especially with some suitable filtering - I'd expect the result to look reasonable, even if not as razor-sharp as it'd be without scaling.)

Is this possible today, or is anyone working towards making this possible?

There’s no particular reason individual apps can’t have their own DPI multipliers.

Windows can do it per application per monitor.

I doubt there’s much call to integrate it with mouse controls, though. Usually people don’t want to zoom desktop apps very often.

It's possible in KDE to launch gtk3/qt5 apps with a specific scaling factor, so if you know beforehand you want .75 or 1.50 for this application, you can edit the .desktop file for it. You can't change it 'on-the-fly' once it has launched though.

Info found on this thread: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/scaling-individual-applications-in-kde-plasma/109075

Lot's of support folk want a (network) remote host to display a GRAPHICAL window on a local host -- like:

$ ssh -X -C -l remote_username -p remote_port_number 192.168.NN.MM

So do I.......and I've looked, and it seems Wayland does not help with this sort of remote GRAPHICAL access.

Please advise!!

It doesn't have it, and it's not going to have it as part of the Wayland protocol.

What there is is an X server called XWayland that runs on top using the Wayland protocol to talk to the compositor (think display driver). But it's not perfect, even though it is mainlined in X.org's X server. And I believe that it has problems with remote sessions, and many things like window re-parenting and keymap modifications, and possibly cut-and-paste will not work exactly the same to anything outside of the XWayland display. I've not played around with it much, so I don't really know.

Having got used to using X for the last 30 years, this seems to be a backwards step to me.

Replacement of anything that's been working for 30 years has to serve all the existing use cases otherwise it's a step backwards.

For native wayland programs, use waypipe.

For X11 programs, if you use XWayland, you should still be able to use X forwarding.

.....and please......don't tell me about vnc or remmina!!

I get the idea that Wayland insists on CSD, explicitly not supporting SSD. That is a massively arrogant and F you decision.

So everything is going the Wayland route? Does it have XDMCP functionality? RDP and VNC are not comparable in terms of functionality and flexibility.

Not convinced - for us, Wayland still seems to have fundamental issues, like not actually working. The number of times we've had apocalyptic desktop weirdness happening, second or third screens going AWOL, or unexplained 'treacle wading', it seems to have Wayland always. Flip to X11 and everything's happy and normal again. This is on recent Ubuntu versions. I'm guessing in another 10 years it'll be fully ready for primetime.

Interesting, yesterday I booted an Ubuntu 23.10 nightly build, on a shiny new Intel i5 laptop, and it still kicks into X11 by default, even now.