Ranter's Cornerxrandr

  

Press Ctrl+Enter to quickly submit your post
Quick Reply  
 
 
  
 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)   1 Feb 11:23 
 To:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)      6 of 33 
43090.6 In reply to 43090.5 
If you do much gaming or screen recording/streaming it's quite broken. Performance is *still* worse than X, and games will randomly crash or have strange issues.

On top of its just being a stupid design. I tried Gnome out to see if things were any better outside of (what used to be called) WMs (they're not). Went to take a screenshot and my screenshot tool didn't work. Because, of course, something as basic as a screenshot tool is "compositor"-specific.

It's fine for very basic usage - web browsers, terminals, desktop applications - but it falls down if you try to do anything beyond that. The fact that screen recording *still* doesn't work right, especially if you're working with both wayland and xwayland clients, is kinda shocking. But again, it's all per-compositor.

It's a stupid design which only makes sense in an environment where you don't trust your software, I can only assume it was designed with phones in mind rather than desktop computers. *And* it still doesn't work.

Meanwhile, X works great.
 
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  william (WILLIAMA)   1 Feb 12:06 
 To:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)      7 of 33 
43090.7 In reply to 43090.5 
I hardly feel I'm in a position to comment. I stopped taking an active interest in the development of Linux and its parts just about the time there were stirrings about an extraordinarily horribly named thing called Wayland. I run 2 raspberry Pi boxes with Raspbian that I occasionally update and prod. One is just there to run Apache and some Samba shares to backup the various Windows machines around the house. The other has the snap for my Nextcloud server and I really ought to take more care of it. My music PC will shortly become a Linux computer as it won't update to Windows 11, so I may be more interested then. The point of this ramble is, where does the pressure to move to Wayland come from? Seems to me, from what I can make out, that the pressure is from the corporate world and developers with a corporate view of things.

Am I misguided about that? It just seems to me that the obsession with the supposed insecurity of xorg (as witnessed by the plethora of x11 viruses) is exactly what litigation-averse corporate types worry about. As a bonus, Wayland wipes out a multitude of interesting and useful things that that xorg offers. The last thing a corporate IT department wants is developers doing interesting and useful things that aren't controlled from the top, or that may not focus on the margin.

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)   1 Feb 12:11 
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)      8 of 33 
43090.8 In reply to 43090.6 
Oh right. That's why I run Win10 in dual-boot for gaming (triple-boot with Win7 bare metal on board, which I've pretty much stopped using since I switched it to virtualbox on Fedora, with considerable performance and stability gains).

Are you running games through Wine or are they linux-native (is there such a thing) ?
“Event gives public the chance to experience round tables”
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)   1 Feb 12:27 
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)      9 of 33 
43090.9 In reply to 43090.7 
I don't think I'd try Wayland desktop on a low-power box like a Pi, I would probably go command-line, especially for Apache and file-sharing. I'm not really familiar with Wayland and all its talking points, I decided to try it after running x for many years, and I can't say I've been disappointed. Maybe it's too bad that corporate interests (IBM, née RedHat) have taken over great swaths of Linux development, and bent it to their needs. OTOH there seems to be a paucity of developers who will work for free.
“Event gives public the chance to experience round tables”
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  Peter (BOUGHTONP)    1 Feb 15:42 
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)      10 of 33 
43090.10 In reply to 43090.4 
First commit Sep 2008, first release Feb 2012, API stability Jul 2013.

:/

Long before Wayland reaches a satisfactory level, it'll have been replaced by SystemD's display server..

 
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  william (WILLIAMA)   1 Feb 15:47 
 To:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)      11 of 33 
43090.11 In reply to 43090.9 
I mainly run everything headless anyway. The default for Raspbian (Debian) is now Wayland, although you can choose to switch back to x11 with the raspi-config tool. I'm running x on both machines at present but neither of them are on the latest distro. I suppose I should update my Nextcloud box as this is pointing at the web.

I have no idea how IBM run their Redhat business: probably every bit as heartlessly as any other vast corporation. I used to have a lot of time for the IBM people I worked with who all seemed pretty decent people. But then again, that was mainly on DB2, and DB2 is a world within a world at IBM, and a huge number of the staff are enthusiasts who love working with DB2.

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)   1 Feb 22:35 
 To:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)      12 of 33 
43090.12 In reply to 43090.8 
Linux gaming is amazing currently.

There are some Linux native games but game devs really don't know what they're doing with Linux so Proton (Valve's Wine fork) is usually preferable.

Virtually everything on Steam runs in Proton. The only exceptions tend to be stuff with very invasive anti-cheat. There is support for that in Proton but the dev has to toggle it on.

Everything else runs great. Generally within singe digits fps of Windows performance, sometimes better than Windows, and improving constantly.

I game a lot and I've not touched Windows for well over ten years.

The Steam Deck has helped too. Virtually everything was running in Proton anyway, but now devs care about Proton performance.
 
 
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)   1 Feb 22:37 
 To:  Peter (BOUGHTONP)       13 of 33 
43090.13 In reply to 43090.10 
Haha. I'd kinda welcome that. Much as systemd can be annoying at times, their shit *works*.
 
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)   2 Feb 10:28 
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)      14 of 33 
43090.14 In reply to 43090.12 
Wow. I must try that!
“Event gives public the chance to experience round tables”
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  Peter (BOUGHTONP)    2 Feb 14:44 
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)      15 of 33 
43090.15 In reply to 43090.13 
Except when it deletes your entire home directory, refuses to shutdown, falls-back to Google DNS servers, misuses private Google time servers, etc...
 
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)   4 Feb 01:26 
 To:  Peter (BOUGHTONP)       16 of 33 
43090.16 In reply to 43090.15 
The google DNS servers was a weird choice, yeah. The rest I've never encountered.

In what situation does it delete your home directory? :')

Do you have to be using homed?
 
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)   4 Feb 11:30 
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)      17 of 33 
43090.17 In reply to 43090.16 
Call me insane but, I have this hunch Peter is not your average Linux user.
“Event gives public the chance to experience round tables”
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  Peter (BOUGHTONP)    4 Feb 16:03 
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)     CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)      18 of 33 
43090.18 In reply to 43090.16 
I don't believe it was dependent on homed (there's no mention of that being the case).

It's caused in v256 by trying to remove temporary files with a tool called "systemd-tmpfiles" which is described as "systemd-tmpfiles, systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service, systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service, systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service, systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer - Creates, deletes and cleans up volatile and temporary files and directories"

If a user decided to use --purge to clean up those files, but doesn't know that this tool also manages the /home directory by default, that's their fault for not reading the entire man page and every config file it mentions to discover this. (Of course, there was no mention of it managing /home in the man page, and even after the issue was raised and closed it still doesn't explicitly mention that but dances around with things like "Historically, it was designed to manage volatile and temporary files, as the name suggests, but it provides generic file management functionality and can be used to manage any kind of files".)

There was also another bug in an earlier release, if using systemd-tmpfiles in the intended way, which destroys the entire root partition, because the incompetent programmers allowed "/path/.*" to not just match dotfiles, but also match "/path/.."

In both cases, there wasn't just the bug, there was a shitty reaction, claiming there's no issue and blaming the person raising the issue, rather than just shutting up and fixing it.


> Call me insane but, I have this hunch Peter is not your average Linux user.

*shrug* I try to pay at least superficial attention to what major parts of my system are doing - not entirely through choice but because it seems to be the only way to keep it being somewhat my system.

Three decades ago paying attention to what things do wouldn't have been atypical amongst people using Linux systems?

 
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  william (WILLIAMA)   4 Feb 17:44 
 To:  Peter (BOUGHTONP)       19 of 33 
43090.19 In reply to 43090.18 
Again, I'm very out of the loop with all things Linux, but it didn't take me long to discover a very abrasive relationship between some in the Linux world and the systemd devs. It also seemed likely that this is in part (at least) to the social skills/attitudes/agenda of Lennart Poettinger. 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)   4 Feb 22:42 
 To:  Peter (BOUGHTONP)       20 of 33 
43090.20 In reply to 43090.18 
I accidentally nuked my downloads directory (of ~4-5 years worth of assorted downloads) a few months back. It had stuff I wish I could recover, but rm -rf is pretty fucking final. I was trying to do a backup of it but lost track of which directory I was working in. Gone.
“Event gives public the chance to experience round tables”
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)   5 Feb 07:03 
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)      21 of 33 
43090.21 In reply to 43090.19 
I think systemd exposed a tension that was emerging in Linux between wanting things to be simple to use and simple to understand. And you can't really have both.

Systemd's init is really simple to use. Give it a unit file and it basically handles the rest. Don't have to worry about dependencies or ordering or what happens if the thing crashes, it just handles all of that and works well.

But if you want to know what your init is up to - what it's doing when and why, it's a nightmare. It's virtually a black box.

It really represents the professionalisation of Linux. It's less something to play with and understand and more something you can stick on a 'workstation' and not worry about.

I use a lot of systemd stuff, some of it is very good. I like its networking stack and its timers for example. But that professionalisation does rub me up the wrong way. I don't want corporatised Linux.

If it gets too bad, there's always BSD.

Speaking of which, this is an interesting and balanced talk about Systemd by a BSD dev.

(I know you basically said you're not interested but someone might be!)

 
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  william (WILLIAMA)   5 Feb 07:45 
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)      22 of 33 
43090.22 In reply to 43090.21 
That was *kind of* the feeling I was getting in my meandering around the topic. Not so much that I'm not interested as I don't understand what systemd is doing as it does it - or a lot of Linux these days. 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar
+1/1
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  william (WILLIAMA)   5 Feb 15:05 
 To:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)      23 of 33 
43090.23 In reply to 43090.21 
Yeah, that's an interesting talk. I was coming round to thinking what he had to say about Lennart Poettinger, ie death threats are not cool. But at the same time, Poettinger seems like a guy who wants to corporatise the start up and management of linux, but can't abide the corporate controls (such as thoroughly logging and investigating bugs) that go with that. He also seems every bit as resistant to change that he isn't making as any change-resistant linux dev, eg changing from using Google DNS and Time servers as a fallback. I saw an exchange with somebody who raised that as an issue, pointing out that Google doesn't necessarily share the aims of every linux user, where he closed the bug report with: 
 
Quote: 
Christ, what's next? You accuse us of controlling people's minds with vaccinations we get directly from Bill Gates? And that systemd uses 5G to spread CoV-2? I don't think we need the input from the script kiddie peanut gallery here.
But, whatever, a nice run through of the history and how systemd got where it is. I suspect it's there to stay judging from the pies it has its fingers in.

I'm not a big fan of the "if you don't like it write your own" argument. It's a bit disingenuous. Not many people have the resources, time, financial support to do that, and certainly not the clout to get their version incorporated into multiple distros. 

Not sure how I feel about containers, and I say that as somebody who runs nextcloud from a snap which is next door to the same thing. I thought he rather side-stepped the question from the guy who mentioned dll-hell.

 

He May Be Your Dog But He's Wearing My Collar
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)   6 Feb 04:18 
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)      24 of 33 
43090.24 In reply to 43090.23 
Yeah, generally I like that the people behind FOSS projects are actual humans with human virtues and failings. Some of them are lovely, some of them are dickheads. Rather than stepford PR pleasantness of corporations, like.

I don't like it when FOSS (or adjacent stuff) gets corporate or startuppy. The Mastodon dude leans that way.

It's nice when devs are attentive to their users but I also don't mind it when they're like: I made this, it works for me, you can use it if you like but it is what it is, I'm making the decisions.

The problem with Pottering is that he's doing that latter *within Redhat*, which, as you've said, is just kinda weird.

"Write your own" is bullshit, yeah. At least when aimed at individuals. And he *totally* sidestepped the DLL thing, yeah.

I think the interesting part of the talk was just identifying the necessity(?) for a system layer which takes care of all that semi-persistent state stuff on modern computers. I buy it *up to a point*. As soon as he gives examples he kinda loses me because he's not describing anything like how I use my computer. I *think* he's describing something like a phone.

I think flatpaks and snaps, and also wayland and systemd to an extent, are really about making Linux more friendly to corporations and proprietary software vendors. Flatpaks and snaps make no sense to me whatsoever in a package-managed system. Same with docker on servers. I use docker images when that's what's supplied but I hate doing so. It's a very unlinuxy (and inefficient and inflexible) way to distribute software.

I like containers in principle. They're a better way to do a lot of what was previously done in VMs. I know Steam makes a lot of use of containers on Linux (no idea what it does on Windows), to essentially give each game all the stuff it needs, and that makes sense - that's the neatest way to do that (but again, it's really working around the flaws in proprietary software. Games in this case).

And I like distrobox. It's a little program that lets you install and run another distro on your running kernel. so if I want to try out the Debian version of some program, or use a program that's not provided by my distro, it's an easy and pretty light way to do that.

Linux is getting more coporatey over time. And I fear that as it gets more mainstream (aided by stuff like Steam Deck), what happened to the web will happen to Linux. Or it'll become Android. As soon as I can run my games on BSD I'll probably hop over.




 
 
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

 From:  Drew (X3N0PH0N)   6 Feb 04:19 
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)      25 of 33 
43090.25 In reply to 43090.23 
Also, re: dockers etc.

 
0/0
 Reply   Quote More 

Reply to All  
 

1–20  21–33

Rate my interest:

Adjust text size : Smaller 10 Larger

Beehive Forum 1.5.2 |  FAQ |  Docs |  Support |  Donate! ©2002 - 2025 Project Beehive Forum

Forum Stats