Wayland was the last straw for me. It made me switch to Macs after 20 years of almost exclusive Linux on the desktop and a few dev stints. It was cool when my time was less expensive.
I check the state of the linux world about once a year still. And obviously keep using it on the servers.
Best of luck to everyone using it for desktop. I totally get why you do it, but it's just not for me right now.
But why? X11 works. I've tried wayland in 2010, second time today. If anything today's story shows that developers do not want to work on X11 and how much we depend on Red Hat.
X11 problems explained by Daniel Stone [1]. As I understand there are two parallel architectures, one uses X11 server primitives (xfontsel), another renders on client (fontconfig fc-list etc). It is very confusing.
I was provided with a Macbook Pro 15" by my work and I struggle to understand comments like this.
Upgrades often break things, I'm forced to use brew to install software which leaves files strewn around the file system and regularly seems to have cross package conflicts.
And don't get me started on the hardware - the laptop is excessively heavy and the keyboard is awful (and I don't just mean the touch bar gimmick).
My personal laptop is a Lenovo Carbon X1 and Fedora runs very nicely on it, requiring very little thought put into management if you're running the default desktop (Gnome). I can update the firmware and BIOS from inside Linux, and Lenovo have even started shipping newer versions of the laptop with Fedora pre-installed.
There's massive scope of tinkering with Linux if you want to, but as long as you're careful with the hardware you buy there's absolutely no need to tinker at all if you don't want to.
That's fine, there's no reason why everyone needs to understand why I do what I do :) I agree with you on FOSS software brittleness though, Linux is usually better on that front. Brew is a hack that works well enough in practice, however.
Except that, in the name of progress, various things are broken in the x11 world too on fedora, as a direct consequence of the wayland updates. Which is unfortunate
We used to have a well-functioning display server that was robust and battle-tested.
The wayland people replaced that with a half-baked solution because they insisted on boiling the ocean - replacing the entire thing in one go, instead of working piecemeal (which the X protocol was explicitly designed to allow).
Which is a great pity, because now the day of the Linux Desktop is even further off.
X.Org people replaced it with Wayland. Are you going to maintain X.Org? Who is going to maintain it? Maybe you are going to hire developers to preserve purity?
> instead of working piecemeal
That's exactly what happened. Do you remember fonts without anti-aliasing? Run xfontsel, that's X11 fonts rendering. Freetype, Fontconfig, Cairo, Pango, HarfBuzz work on client side and push pixels to X Server. Entire rendering model changed, X.Org become compositor. They've faced limits, they've implemented DRI, DRI2 [1].
Now developers decided to make good compositor. And they've done it without disturbing X11 ecosystem, with clean way to port toolkits. Window Managers can't be ported but they can be reimplemented, just look how many compositors people built [2]. It is a miracle.
Linux future is bright. Video drivers moved from X Server to kernel, display configuration parts replaced by KMS, we've got modern font rendering, text shaping, we've got open source AMD GPU driver!
I still use Intel GPU, X.Org and xmonad, but the times they are a changing.
Sounds like a Fedora problem then. Pick a different distro - problem solved.
There is nothing so special going on in Fedora that can’t be done in other distros. Try an Arch based Linux desktop. You’ll get newer packages and better package management. Manjaro has worked well for me.
Have you considered using a tiling window manager? I've been using bspwm for years and it just uses X. I don't really miss anything about floating window managers, and since switching everything feels more stable and portable
I check the state of the linux world about once a year still. And obviously keep using it on the servers.
Best of luck to everyone using it for desktop. I totally get why you do it, but it's just not for me right now.