XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services, have harmed the Mac experience. The issue of soldered RAM and storage in particular pushed me back to Windows after more than 15 years of using Macs (which is a shame since Apple's ARM hardware is awesome when it comes to performance and energy consumption); the last time I used Windows as my daily-driver OS was during the XP era. Unfortunately I don't like any of the mainstream desktop operating systems; Windows is annoying and loves to get in the way, macOS is becoming increasingly annoying with each release and is also tied to hardware with massive prices for RAM and storage upgrades with no DIY options like in the past, and the Linux desktop has a Sisyphean development cycle with so much churn. Instead of working on refining the user experience and polishing applications like LibreOffice to make them more competitive to Microsoft Office, it seems like every few years there are major infrastructure changes that require major code changes or even rewrites.

I'm quite disillusioned with desktop computing in general. Microsoft and Google are leading the way with "enshittification" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and the Mac experience in 2024 isn't like what it was in 2009 when the Mac was at its peak, in my opinion. The Linux desktop ecosystem suffers from a lack of funding relative to its commercial peers, combined with the "organization from chaos" that comes with bazaar-style development. The X11 to Wayland transition would be easier to pull off if the Linux desktop has Microsoft- or Apple-levels of funding and cooperation, but such funding doesn't exist, and part of the characteristic of the bazaar is that developers and teams of developers get to work on projects of their own interest and its the community that "votes" on projects by using them. The bazaar definitely exhibits freedom, but the major downside is that major changes in infrastructure (such as the X11 to Wayland transition) could take a lot of time and have major pain points (for example, the development of incompatible Wayland compositors and the fact that the X11 concept of a window manager doesn't exactly translate to Wayland's concepts).

I love free, open source software, but I'm drawn more to cathedral-style projects such as the BSDs and HaikuOS where there is a coherent vision for the system. Unfortunately the BSDs are dependent on the broader FOSS ecosystem for desktops, which is dominated by the GNOME/KDE/Wayland ecosystem (which also priorities Linux and treats other Unix-like operating systems as an afterthought, but that's another discussion). I'll need to re-investigate HaikuOS to see whether it can be used as a daily driver today; I've seen that a lot of attention has been given to HaikuOS in recent years.

I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the Newton, which involved a Lisp OS (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). But I have a busy day job and so this will take years of effort on the side.

I once noticed a memory leak in KDE when setting the background to a (very many image) slideshow instead of a single image. That was probably sometime around 2015.

Normally it's a bit tricky to calculate memory blame between X11, the WM, and the shell, since often their allocations are actually on behalf of an application, and killing the application will reclaim it.

Xfce all day every (work) day.

I've been using it for years and years. I started when it was the only lag free WM I could run on an atom powered netbook (the only "pc" I had at the time)!

Now many years later im still using it, and it still makes me happy. I'm not sure if people know what it's like to be able to click on something and have it work instantly with no lag.

It is a great piece of software, thank you to all the Devs who work on it!

Edit: I've seen a few complaints about hidpi. I'm not sure if this helps, but I have a 4k laptop screen, usb-c to a 4k monitor, and hdmi to a regular 1024 monitor orientated vertical.

By setting x2 in the appearance settings both the 4k monitors look beautiful, and then in the screen manager (where you can move around the screens and set orientation, I just have to set 2x scale on the 1024 monitor and it's fine. Like obviously less good than the 4ks... But it is a worse monitor. I'm surprised it all works so well to be honest!

Because for us (Xfce) that would probably take 15 years.

The only component that requires major changes is the WM. Otherwise, for the rest of them, it's more about fixing platform specific quirks.

(Ok, we did have to write an embedded compositor library for our panel to use, but... yeah.)

I regret clicking this link without Adblock. Popover videos, mailing list signups, giant ads taking most of my verticle space, ugh.

Does anyone a cleaner article?