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 I don't know the blog and I do use Wayland but I suspect people are angry because I'm typically distro fashion it was pushed in when so many bugs and missing features still remain as compared to X.

The Free Software movement doesn't win because we're more Free, it wins when we have unilaterally better quality software then the other stuff.

Yes this is an uphill battle but we have a lot of good people on our side.

Wayland went into "production" too early and is still making users suffer.

@purpleidea Counterpoint: Debian stable and other LTS distros exist.

People want two things at once: the latest and greatest stuff, and stability. Those things are not compatible.

If you're using Fedora, say, and complaining that "this isn't production ready" then ... why the hell are you using Fedora? Why are you using GNOME rather than, say, Xfce or MATE? And, most importantly, why are people complaining about stuff they're getting *for free*?

This goes back to the consumer mindset that people have rather than the mindset that FOSS is a not-capitalist endeavor that requires a bit of participation on people's parts.

I know that's well outside the FOSS movement's ability to solve, but like I said at CfgMgmtCamp - FOSS was supposed to change the world, but what's happened is that it's been changed instead; people say "give me convenience or give me death" rather than worrying about their liberty.

Sigh.

@jzb I do agree and your last paragraph here is 💯 on the mark.

Sadly I'm not convinced that Debian is a good user experience.

We're losing the quality/features/experience war because a shiny mac book actually has really good battery life and a pretty good user experience.

People unwilling to pay for Free Software is a major unsolved problem. I think I know a lot about this space both with #mgmtconfig and also with working because of working at AWS. It's sad :(

@purpleidea tangent: battery life is literally the main selling point for me on my MacBook - I can work all day and still have 20% left. It’s wild!
@whack I only hope that some day I'll have such an experience on GNU+Linux :( I'd love to be able to coffee shop without needing to sit next to and outlet :/
@purpleidea the dream!!!
@whack Lenovo was selling some high end (and outrageously priced) ARM64 laptop which I considered buying before I realized drivers and other things on Linux would probably be very sub par. Even a brand new "Fedora preinstalled" thinkpad has a ton of driver issues.
@purpleidea @whack brand new probably is your core issue here.
The true thinkpads (not counting E-series, and not counting aarch64 for different reasons), pretty much work flawlessly on modern Linux, as long as your Kernel is newer than the laptop you are using. If you can't tolerate/fix minor driver issues, buying a discounted last years ThinkPad usually is the better choice. (This has always been true)
@mxk @purpleidea I loved my thinkpads for years but I’ve never once had one with a good quality screen. Maybe that’s changed though
@whack @mxk Unfortunately I bought the 4k version because I wanted a nice screen and the drivers are so bad that I can't get usable performance on it. Have to lower it to *less* than 2k even to make it not lag. For sale if someone wants to play with drivers or install windows.