There's a "Wayland set the Linux desktop back" blog going around now and ... it just makes me so tired.

That take is so amazingly wrong, but so persistent and popular. It is the "immigrants took mah job!" of takes for software. It is so flawed in so many different ways, and utterly ignores the host of actual reasons that Linux has stalled on the desktop.

It is apparently seductive, too, because it offloads the blame entirely on the crew developing Wayland without the person casting the blame considering for even a second the actual complexity of the problems. I could literally write a book on the reasons that the Linux desktop hasn't caught on; and I would, too, if I thought people would actually buy it and read it (a lot of people, I mean - enough to justify writing a book...)

But it boils down to this: Linux desktop development doesn't have more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the funding per year that Microsoft or Apple spend on marketing a single product line. Much less the kind of funds that go into R&D.

Vendors, mostly, are disinterested in supporting an OS that has less than 10% market share. At times they have even been actively dissuaded from doing so by certain other companies...

Users are, by and large, not willing to deal with inconvenience or having to learn new things in order to adopt the Linux desktop, even though the two main vendors are constantly making the user experience worse and continually taking away control of our own devices.

Wayland? It's a convenient scapegoat.

I'm not, by the way, arguing that Wayland is perfect, or that the community behind it has executed everything perfectly. And I'm certainly not arguing that people haven't had bad experiences with Wayland; that hasn't been _my_ experience, but I also have been using Linux for 30 years now -- and I choose hardware based on its Linux compatibility. I also have different expectations from a desktop than someone who has used Windows or macOS most of their life.

OK. Rant over. Be nicer to the Wayland folks. Stop blaming them for everything. In fact, let's maybe consider that what would really be useful is constructive takes on how we can succeed from here.

@jzb While I didn't write a book on it, I did write a pretty long blog post on it recently. tl;dr: MacOS X also shares a good deal of the blame.

https://kylerank.in/blog/linux-desktop-renaissance.html

Linux Desktop Renaissance

@kyle @jzb I was ready to disagree, but if I understand your point it's essentially that many pragmatic developers moved to Mac in the 2000s and with them a lot of the motivation and energy to work on Linux desktop infrastructure. Seems fair.
@mirth @jzb Yes, exactly this. I elaborate on the point in the blog post.
@kyle
Just read. V interesting. Used OpenSuSE for years but also Ubuntu & Mac (not Windows for around 30 years) & zOS for 7ish. You brought me up to date on the ebbs & flows. Thanks
@jzb

@kyle @jzb i think you have a good eye for it, thanks for taking the time to write it all up on your website. *I* am one of those Linux dev/sysadmins who moved to a Linux desktop from Windows95 in the late 90s and then to MacOSX in the mid 2000s (while working at a company that was all-Linux, my first workstation was a VALinux machine) for exactly the reasons you descrbe, the PowerBook G4 was a better Unix workstation with working graphics, X11, suspend and all the ports, without all the drama and tweaking of Linux, and the OSX NextSTEP flavor UI was better than GNOME and KDE of the era.

That isnt true now for the reasons you have stated, im running Silverblue on a Dell Precision for work and Bazzite for my home computers which works *great*. Ive never needed to use vi in /etc in anger which is the right amount of computer-touching for the machines i rely on. I love all the little Adwaita apps on Flathub that just do one useful thing and arent trying to upsell you on a cloud subscription service. Its fantastic