RE: https://floss.social/@gnome/116251314283038831

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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.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jimmac/116256351468919965

gnome 50 is a nice round-number excuse to try building a gnome app. just do something for yourself, for no good reason. it's bloody fun to build a desktop app in 2026. and you know you need something to take the edge off.

you can use typescript or rust or python or c# or java or basically whatever language is hip with the kids these days. which means no haskell. sorry. it's not 2009.

there are even ways to write desktop apps in go: https://codeberg.org/puregotk/puregotk

as a bonus, if your weird little app goes anywhere, you might get a fun icon. ❤️

people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux

I would generally agree that the whole approach of these laws is total dogshit and clearly a wedge issue to enable stricter surveillance laws in the future

at the same time though, the actual implementation and potentially having a portal which exposes the users age bracket seems totally reasonable as a way to implement parental controls... I'm also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they're doing that why shouldn't adults get the same treatment?

what im totally miffed about though is why the fuck would you get mad at systemd for adding a birthDate field to userdb, what would you have them do? Would you rather every desktop environment had its own way to store this data??

An XDG portal for this also means you can *trivially* write a stub that always identifies you as an adult or even lets you pick per-app (heck maybe per website! that might be the new cursed way of avoiding trackers under late stage capitalism)

and yeah it sure would be shit if we get real-id laws in a few years, but systemd or XDG standing on "principle" and refusing to implement this API is absolutely not going to lead to better outcomes for anyone. The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!

I could spend the whole day blowing this thing up

https://editor.p5js.org/isohedral/full/vJa5RiZWs

only been back to GNOME full-time for about 2 months and whenever I open my MacBook it's jarring...

nothing is polished anymore. everything is a bit ugh. and I haven't even upgraded to the latest macOS yet.

times have changed. designers use #Linux.