Lapo

@lapz
7 Followers
51 Following
26 Posts

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.

@jimmac you can always count on me for that, ya know 😀
@jimmac the most important thing to note is how much work used to go in our nice illustrations. The minimal icons we use today are done in minutes, we use to spend days or even weeks for a single application icon back then.
@jimmac as I used to say at the time: RealMenTM use vectors, you silly 3d freak! :-D
@jimmac workspace indicator (in a colorblind friendly color though)
@jimmac same
@ebassi @sophie I love this one: "behave like shell scripts, and error out at the first thing their read that they don't like"
@alice sounds polite and professional to me. Formatting each sentence in a lists with emojois would have been fun though :-)
10 months ago Federica Brignone had a very bad injury, so bad that she still doesn't walk right. Today she won her second gold medal at Milano-Cortina 2026.
@jimmac a full set of card figures would be nice. Just sayin'