The fundamental architectural issue with Wayland is expecting everyone to implement a compositor for a half baked, changing, protocol instead of implementing a common platform to develop on. Wayland doesn’t really exist, it’s just a few distinct developer teams playing catch-up, pretending to be compatible with each other.

Implementing the hard part once and allowing someone to write a window manager in 100 lines of C is what X did right. Plenty of other things that are bad with X, but not that.

Tell me you never deployed remote linux desktop in an enterprise environment without telling me you never deployed remote desktop linux in an enterprise environment.

After these decades of Wayland prosperity, I still can’t get a commercially supported remote desktop solution that works properly for a few hundred users. Why? Because on X, you could highjack the display server itself and feed that into your nice TigerVNC-server, regardless of desktop environment. Nowadays, you need to implement this in each separate compositor to do it correctly (i.e. damage tracking). Also, unlike X, Wayland generally expects a GPU in your remote desktop servers, and have you seen the prices for those lately?

Programmers use butterflies.

Real sysadmins use programmers.

The M-series hardware is locked down and absofuckinglutely proprietary and locked down and most likely horrible to repair.

But holy shit, every other laptop I’ve ever used looks and feels like a cheap toy in comparison. Buggy firmware that can barely sleep, with shitty drivers from the cheapest components they could find. Battery life in low single digits. The old ThinkPads are kinda up there in perceived ”build quality”, but I haven’t seen any other laptop that’s even close to a modern macbook. Please HP, Dell, Lenovo, Framework or whoever , just give me a functional high quality laptop. I’ll pay.

Moving people from closed commercial offerings onto something self hosted is enough work without gatekeeping US open source projects, even if they are flawed. If we want to move normal people away from the commercial offerings onto something better, we can’t do things like that. Better save such warnings for when they are actually needed (”Project X has been dead for five years and is full of security holes, you should migrate to project Y instead”). Keep the experience positive regardless.

You do you, but different people have differing requirements and preferences. Don’t scare them away please.

Because dockers record with regards to security is questionable, and some people like to get automatic updates from their distro. For me personally, I think the design of Docker is absolute garbage. Containers are fine, but Docker is not the correct mechanism for it. (It’s also nothing new, see BSD jails and Solaris zones.)

Immich on Nixos works perfectly, and I also get automatic updates.

If you stay on X, you can keep using the same window manager for longer. My XMonad config is over a decade old, and I bet my old dwm config.h still compiles.

The relative size of the double handling is the potential problem. I think Nvidia is just trying to extend the gold rush for a bit longer.

Agreed, it’s not perfect, especially not with regards to drivers from some of them. But:

https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributors?timeRange=past365days&start=2024-12-31&end=2025-12-31

I expect that the ability of B2C-products to keep their code somewhat closed keeps them from moving to other platforms, while simultaneously pumping money upstream to their suppliers, expecting them to contribute to development. The linked list is dominated by hardware vendors, cloud vendors and B2B-vendors.

Linux didn’t win on technical merit, it won on licensing flexibility. Devs and maintainers are very happy with GPL2. Does it suck if you own a Tivo? Yes. Don’t buy one. On the consumer side, we can do some voting with our wallets, and some B2C vendors are starting to notice.

Do this:

• Calculate the total power cost of running it at 100% load since 2014
• Calculate Flops/Watt and compare with modern hardware
• Calculate MTTF when running at 100% load. Remember that commercial support agreements are 4-5 years for a GPU, and if it dies after that, it stays dead.
• In AI, consider the full failure domain (1 broken GPU = 7+ GPUs out of commission) for the above calculation.

You’ll probably end up with 4-6 years as the usable lifetime of your billion dollar investment. This entire industry is insane. (GTX 1080 here. Was considering an upgrade until the RAM prices hit.)

Nvidia sells plenty of GPUs for actual money, they are good for it.

No, the real issue is the depreciation for the people owning GPUs. Your GPU will be usable for 4-6 years, and 2-4 of those years will be spent as ”the cheap old GPU. After that time, you need new GPUs. (And as the models are larger by then, you need moahr GPU)

How the actual fuck do these people expect to get any ROI on that scale with those timeframes? With training, maybe the trained model can be an asset (lol), but for inference there are basically no residual benefits.

I agree with your morals and your end goal.

How do you want to fund the development of Open Source? Because currently most of it is funded by corporations, in turn funded by ”corporatist simping”. The expectations of the average user simply can’t be fulfilled by hobbyist developers, and then we need funding. How do we get the Windows user ”John Smith” to personally fork over money to the correct developers?

Proton/Wine/KDE would not be in their current state unless they got that sweet proprietary Valve money. In our current world we need to use corporate money to further open source, not fight it. Follow the stream and steer the flow. Given time, we can diversify funding and control.

Yes. Kinda.

How do you think Linux devs get paid? The devices are locked down, sure, but there are strong incentives to upstream code and fund further development upstream. Linux ”won” because of this. You can’t build and develop Linux for such a wide audience and hardware flora with a bunch of hobbyists.

As Linus himself said plenty of times - GPL2 was the correct choice. Roku, Tizen, Chromebooks and Amazon garbage are absolutely within what the developers intended, and the devs are doing the work after all.

From a consumer standpoint, I absolutely agree with you, open everything is wonderful. However - commercial interests currently fund most OSS development. Without those funds, development stops and developers must take other paying jobs (probably closed source). Would be nice to change this, but then we need to completely pivot our funding model. You need to pay devs, either directly or indirectly (taxes, foundations, etc).

So far, the open source community hasn’t been very good at figuring out funding models for consumer products. It usually ends with the development team needing to put food on the table, so they add a subscription and close down parts of the project. About two seconds later, the project has ten forks and the original author can’t buy groceries.

”Buy me a beer” simply isn’t s viable mechanism to fund open source. How should we do it?

Personal preference: Slowly move the public sector towards open source, and require them to provide financial aid to products they use. Not perfect, but something that could happen gradually, without shocking the system.

tl;dr: yes, but also no.

How else would you be webscale?

Look, I’m not saying BitLocker isn’t flawed. I’n m saying the alternatives on Linux are shit. All the primitives are there, and you can do it on Linux, with lots of work, testing and QC of all software updates on all your hardware (or else you’ll do manual entry of disaster recovery keys for the next decade). But on Windows it’s a checkbox to encrypt the entire fleet, along with management of recovery keys.

Also, on audits: for people doing checkbox security (i.e. most regulated industries), this is very easy to audit. You just smack in ”Bitlocker” and you are done. For some, the threat isn’t really information loss, it’s loss of compliance (and therefore revenue). Stupid, but here we are. If you mean actual security, then you are probably correct.

A smart cart only authenticates and identifies the user - it can’t do attestation of the boot chain. If we use a smart card for disk encryption, a malicious or compromised user can just pop out the SSD, mount and decrypt (using the smart card) on a separate machine and extract/modify data without a trace. If you use SB, the TPM and disk encryption as intended, you can trust both the user (via smart card) and the machine (probably via a Kerberos machine key). Basically, this method prevents the user from accessing or modifying data on their own machine.

Again, on Windows this is basic shit any Windows sysadmin can roll out easily following a youtube tutorial or something. Providing those same security controls on Linux will yield a world of pain.

We really need to make this easy on Linux. systemd-boot and UKIs are trying, but are not even close to enough.

You need to have secure boot in order to have the disk decrypt without user input, otherwise the chain is untrusted. You can (and probably should) load your own keys into the firmware and sign everything yourself. MS has nothing to do with it, except that BitLocker is much better than anything any Linux distro has to offer today.

You need to have the disk decrypt without user input, and you can’t have the secret with the user. (As the user is untrusted - could be someone stealing the laptop.) The normal Linux user mantra of ”I own the machine” does not apply here. In this threat model, the corporation owns the machine, and in particular any information on it.

As for sudo, this is why we have polkit. (Yes, technically root, but you get my point)

And as for number 7 - this is why most Windows fleets use ”Software Center” or similar. No reason you can’t do the same on Linux, just that no one has done it yet. (I mean, you can, with pull requests into a puppet repo, but that’s not very user friendly)

Hate RHEL all you want, but first take a look at what distros have any kind of commercial support at all from software vendors. This is the complete list: RHEL, sometimes Rocky, sometimes Ubuntu. Go ask your vendor about Fedora Silverblue and see what happens. The primary reason to run Linux like this is usually to use a specific (and probably very expensive) software that works best on Linux, so distro choice is usually very limited to what that software vendor supports. (And when they say Linux, they are really saying ”the oldest still supported RHEL.)

Basically, corporate requirements go completely against the requirements of enthusiasts and power users. You don’t need Secure Boot to protect your machine from thieves, but a corporation needs Secure Boot to protect the machine from you.

I’ve managed Linux desktop fleets in enterprise-like environments. I’ll modify your list a bit:

1. Use Rocky or RHEL (because the commercial software you want to use only has support for RHEL and/or Ubuntu)
2. disallow root completely without exception
3. do additional hardening
4. don’t allow sudo for fucking anything
5. run centrally controlled configuration management (most likely Puppet)
6. Ironically - disallow any use of Flatpak, Snap and AppImage. They don’t play that well with Kerberized NFS-mounted home directories, which you absofuckinglutely will be required to use. (Might have improved since I tried last time, but probably not. Kerberos and network mounted directories,home or otherwise, are usually a hard requirement.)
7. Install and manage all software via configuration management (again, somewhat ironically, this works very well with RPMs and DEBs, but not with Flatpak/Snap/Appimage). Update religiously, but controlled (i.e. Snap is out).
8. A full reprovision of everything fairly regularly.
9. You most likely want TPM-based unlocking of your LUKS encrypted drives, with SecureBoot turned on. This is very fun to get working properly in a Linux environment, but super simple to do on Windows.

And as you have guessed, on Windows this requires a bit of point and click in SCCM to do decently.

On Linux, you’ll wanna start by getting a few really good sysadmins to write a bunch of Puppet for a year or so.

(If we include remote desktop capabilities in the discussion, I’ll do my yearly Wayland-rant.)

X11 still works fine, despite the FUD.

Xfce4 is one option, several others exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy_for_insomnia

Oh please

https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import