this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 107 points 7 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

This won't be the year of the Wayland desktop for me unless I can afford to replace my Nvidia card this year. I'll never buy one again, but I've still gotta suffer with the one I have a bit longer.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago

I'd suggest you check out NVK.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

By the time you're ready to buy a new card, Nvidia might be working well under wayland. They've already made significant changes in the past couple of years, like implementing GBM and hardware accelerated XWayland. To my understanding, this MR will also fix some remaining issues in the future. I don't know how much more work needs to be done after that, but just the fact they are cooperating with the free software ecosystem is a good sign.

Perhaps more importantly, the free nouveau driver can now experimentally reclock nvidia gpus from the 2000 series and newer. With this breakthrough it is possible that nouveau + nvk will be able to compete with the proprietary driver in the near future. If/when we have a well-supported free driver, we will probably have proper wayland support as well.

I'm not really in a hurry to switch to Nvidia. I've been quite happy with my AMD cards so far. But it's definitely a good thing to have the option to buy from any vendor.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Which apps? I've discovered recently Electron apps can enable Wayland support with a command line argument.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

But isn't that still on par with xorg where you can't have any fractional scaling?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

*every application using xWayland looks like crap.

Native Wayland apps work great with fractional scaling.

[–] TornadoRex 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

As someone who dabbles in Linux but is ultimately a regular people, what’s the advantage of this?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 7 months ago (2 children)

A unified, bug-free, performant and featureful display stack to ensure people can use things like Variable refresh rate, which, iirc, is an impossibility on X11.

[–] TornadoRex 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

That’s pretty awesome. I imagine this would be a huge advantage with the growth of Linux gaming too

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I suppose the Steam Deck experience would be a bit worse if it wasn't running on Wayland 👍

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

The games on Steam Deck are already running in Wayland using gamescope IIRC

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Yeah, it could be and it will be

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Wait, what? I'm on PopOS, with Nvidia GPU, and my "g-sync" VRR works fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

PopOS uses GNOME which hopefully uses Wayland

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I can confirm that PopOS 22.04 is definitely running on X. wayland is officially coming when Cosmic releases.

That said, I see that Wayland is "available" if I want to manually switch to it - but it is definitely disabled as a default (and current) setting.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

This is what wayland said every year lol.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

KDE 6 will have Wayland by default, on track to release Feb 2024.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Source?

We have been hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop” for 20 years I think and Linux has less than 5% share.

In contrast, I do not remember hearing “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” until recently. I have been hearing “Wayland is the future” forever but it has been correct the whole time.

By the time we enter 2025, I am not sure there will be a major desktop environment that does not support Wayland and many distros and DEs will be Wayland by default or even Wayland only. That is already happening. Valve may have ditched X by then and it feels like that is where most new Linux users are going to come from. It seems quite unlikely that Wayland market share on the Linux Desktop will be less than 75%.

I am not saying this is “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” but I would feel foolish publicly betting against it.

[–] azvasKvklenko 3 points 7 months ago

nobody would say that one year ago far as my memory goes, and it’s reasonable thing to say now. Personally I expected some break-throughs that have happened in 2023 to take much longer.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Not sure this is the year but my “highly technical reason” is that enough gamers switch.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The Linux desktop is forever, one year cannot contain it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Indeed! I'm not planning to go back to Winblows unless I'm being paid for it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago

This is for real the Linux desktop year for me, went through the switch just before the new year. Had to reinstall a couple times but no big deal, and I get to learn as well.

Not sure if out-of-the-box distros are now that user friendly yet or not, but I remember getting Ubuntu running several years ago was frustrating (no sound, bad sound quality etc) and now running EOS was pretty smooth. Pretty sure something like Mint will be user friendly enough for the general population.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

It will be a pleasure, like every other year of the Linux Desktop(TM) for more than 20 years now! :-)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Year of the chromeOS desktop maybe, may faith is low

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (3 children)

People still use ChromeOS? I just slap Linux on my chromebooks. Cheap new hardware.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I actually really like Chrome OS myself. For the people around me who are less tech literate, Chrome OS is actually great. It's quite easy to support. It's fast, and it's got a really good ecosystem now thanks to all the integrations.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

I just did an OS reinstall for the first time in about 4 years. Moving from Manjaro back to Arch. Happy New Year!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Here's to another year of the Linux Desktop! (been ~15 years for me) 🎉

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What is the purpose of these copyright lines on comments?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Think AI training. I might write a blurb somewhere that I can link to someday, but that's the gist of it.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Do you have any evidence that writing that line actually works to keep AI from using your comment? If some of the biggest authors alive can’t keep their words out of the algorithm, I’m not convinced that a Lemmy comment stands a chance.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)
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