wyatta whole class of the old computers i like will become infinitely less usable under linux in particular the moment toolkits stop supporting X, and this is a genuine problem that should be taken seriously instead of saying "you should just buy shiny new AI-enabled razor thin bendable NPU thing and encourage the bastards ruining tech and just use wayland bro"
hatzka@wyatt framing it as about supporting "the old computers I like" is really not that persuasive tbh. you, personally, preferring older computers is not a reason anyone owes you continued X development. and to anticipate the obvious response: ewaste is a huge problem in general and should be properly reckoned with, but I don't believe the number of computers affected (those that are in active use with up-to-date graphical desktops, and could continue being so for a while yet, but that are old enough that they absolutely need X) is actually all that significant.
@hatzka
1) gain some sympathy for the fact that others are not you and that other value structures are not inherently wrong
2) I did not ask you
3) what did you possibly intend to accomplish by posting this (other than pissing me the fuck off)?
4) there's a secret fourth thing I was thinking of saying to you but I am abstaining from saying it in case I am totally misconstruing something and you aren't actually being a colossal "gnome maintainer" style jerk
1) gain some sympathy for the fact that others are not you and that other value structures are not inherently wrong
2) I did not ask you
3) what did you possibly intend to accomplish by posting this (other than pissing me the fuck off)?
4) there's a secret fourth thing I was thinking of saying to you but I am abstaining from saying it in case I am totally misconstruing something and you aren't actually being a colossal "gnome maintainer" style jerk
@wyatt was this meant to be a vent post? I'm genuinely sorry if I misunderstood. it seemed to me to be trying to persuade the reader (not me personally ofc, but whoever came across it) so I responded with that in mind.
@hatzka it is me saying that there is no fucking reason we need so much overhead and so many pointless upsets in how we program and run software. Graphical interfaces have not fundamentally changed such that new toolkits and graphics subsystems are required, and so forcing people to get newer, shittier hardware because of the greed and absolutely piss-poor programming of a few companies (yes, red hat is a company, IBM is a company, this isn't just about microsoft and apple and oracle, the usual suspects for anything horrible in tech) just for the pursuit of shiny new thing is deeply upsetting to me.
Nearly anything we have now could be done 20 years ago and we already had toolkits back then to make X more bearable. This is change for the sake of change and to keep people employed maintaining this stupid additional infrastructure and porting shit to it
Nearly anything we have now could be done 20 years ago and we already had toolkits back then to make X more bearable. This is change for the sake of change and to keep people employed maintaining this stupid additional infrastructure and porting shit to it
@hatzka (and people telling me that I am wrong for liking what I like, actually, and that I just need to throw more shit into a dump or burn the plastic away to recover the copper and gold content, piss me off because it shows a shallow view of software that i've come to expect from career oriented programmers rather than ones that care about quality)
Damian Yerrick@wyatt @hatzka If I had to guess, these fundamental changes have happened since the XFree86 era:
1. Internationalization: Personal computer use has expanded out of the Americas and western Europe. Asia in particular brings a need for large glyph sets, contextual glyph shaping, diacritic stacking, bidirectional writing, top-to-bottom writing, and antialiasing to make small curves easier to distinguish. How well does X11's font paradigm handle these, as opposed to relying on "modern" toolkits to shove bitmaps around?
2. High density: People expect things to appear the same size on more than one display connected to one computer even if one has more pixels per millimeter than the other.
3. Privacy: Computer networks have become much less trusted over the past few decades. There was demand to deter publishers of proprietary applications from surreptitiously activating a keylogger or screen logger to exfiltrate your data in other applications.
@hatzka I thought my initial posts calling people "the bastards ruining tech" was enough of a sign that I was angry
I would like for everyone to reconsider what they actually fucking need, and why these changes are actually fucking necessary.
I would like for everyone to reconsider what they actually fucking need, and why these changes are actually fucking necessary.
@wyatt of course I can tell you're angry, but that's not what I meant. if you were only venting, this would be absolutely on me for misunderstanding. but it sounds to me like you are trying to convince people, and if that's the case, then I think it's only fair to expect them (us) to respond in kind. isn't that how conversation works? (this is not a rhetorical question; it's still entirely possible I've misunderstood what you were/are doing)
@hatzka if you aren't actively anti-capitalist at every turn i do not have common ground with you.
"no one has any responsibility to maintain X" isn't what this is about, it's about compassion for others and realising that what we're doing (churning out ever more overpowered hardware to do the same tasks we were doing 20 years ago, but with ever sloppier code) is not sustainable or necessary. Sites that worked fine on my computer 15 years ago now bring it to its knees (youtube, facebook, etc.) - and the quality of life of the platforms has decreased in the same time span. There is no reason to buy new hardware except for unsympathetic jerks and project managers who don't value anything except for getting the product out the door. And in my opinion we should not use that software and encourage them
"no one has any responsibility to maintain X" isn't what this is about, it's about compassion for others and realising that what we're doing (churning out ever more overpowered hardware to do the same tasks we were doing 20 years ago, but with ever sloppier code) is not sustainable or necessary. Sites that worked fine on my computer 15 years ago now bring it to its knees (youtube, facebook, etc.) - and the quality of life of the platforms has decreased in the same time span. There is no reason to buy new hardware except for unsympathetic jerks and project managers who don't value anything except for getting the product out the door. And in my opinion we should not use that software and encourage them
@wyatt this is a much better argument than your original post, which read as essentially "my personal favorite hardware is too old to run Wayland and I am going to make it everyone else's problem". (if this characterization of your post feels unfair, consider how it feels for the pro-Wayland side to be described as saying "you should just buy shiny new AI-enabled razor thin bendable NPU thing and encourage the bastards ruining tech", when Wayland didn't cause any of the other problems you mention with more recent hardware.)