51–60 of 76 posts
Wayland is still years away from usable state. You still can't even autotype keepassxc passwords and there are still no good solutions for remote desktop sessions (at least I have not found any last time i checked)
I had to look up what "Gnome Mutter" is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutter_(software) > Mutter is a window manager initially designed and implemented for the X Window System, but then evolved to be a display server ("Wayland compositor"). It became the default window manager in GNOME 3, Gnome alienated some developers around the time of GTK 3, and there have sometimes been regressions, and some opinionated unconve…
fuel the healthy competition is a really positive spin on even more fragmentation . It's sad how Linux desktop eats itself. GNOME is a perpetrator as well. I usually check the GNOME release notes (since I use GNOME on my NixOS laptop) and on a semi-regular basis there is a note that says: replaced app X by a completely new rewrite Y. And there is still no support for basic things like marking up/annotating a screensh…
With the history of unclear alignment, it would be foolish for everyone to rely on Gnome.
But there's a ton of investment and value in that platform. (Much of it before Gnome even started, but now under the Gnome umbrella.)
So "competition" has been giving us alternatives.
Maybe ongoing competition will help keep pressure on Gnome, to be closer to aligned with the user bases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably a better reference. https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/the_price_of_software... > fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way Ironic to promote a far right dev, and demonizing folks who are sick of his shit.
I have no idea about the affiliations of that dev and i have zero interest in defending/promoting or condemning his personal opinions. That being said: i will gladly run working software written from a far right developer rather than half-assed broken software written by a far-left developer. Politics does not influence my choices in software (quality does). Anyway, the thing is: fascist behaviours aren’t an exclusiv…
> Politics does not influence my choices in software (quality does).
Then why are you linking to a guy who has been making broken changes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are multiple angles. As the stewards of GTK, they should , IMO, try to keep it flexible and customizable to whatever extent is manageable and reasonable. This post is about Mutter, which is a window manager, which should have very little to do with the app "ecosystem". They can, and should, do whatever the hell they want with Mutter, GNOME Shell, Nautilus/Files, etc. Even in the link you posted, they're talking…
When I complain about Gnome driving away users with hostility, it's mainly their GTK stewardship I talk of. That, and things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off. Very out of touch.
But, you still couldn't resist complaining about the UI implementations, which sounds more like complaints about GNOME apps and GNOME Shell. Who cares if you think that GNOME Shell looks like it accommodates touch screens? Firefox, for example, uses GTK and doesn't seem to look like a touch screen UI to me as I'm typing into this text box.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many X11 holdouts are still around, really? I'm a curmudgeonly old man fond of old tech, but I have still had a Wayland-only setup since early 2020; once Sway was there as a good tiling window manager, and Emacs got its Wayland-ready pure-gtk branch, there was no need to look back. I of course see people here and there on forums express discontent, but I don't think that demographic is big enough to drive both si…
I'm personally open to Wayland, and able to move to it (and sometimes have, though once I had to back it out because it was breaking too much in a critical factory embedded appliance) (and XMonad works noticeably better for me than i3wm/Sway). But not everyone can move to it. Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, an…
Already a decade ago, I commented on a news-for-nerds site like this one, “Well, GNOME makes choices we don’t like, but they are focused on the corporate-desktop market.” But then a GNOME developer replied to correct me: “That’s an old misconception, we are not mainly focused on the corporate desktop”. So who exactly they are designing for, remains a mystery to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are multiple angles. As the stewards of GTK, they should , IMO, try to keep it flexible and customizable to whatever extent is manageable and reasonable. This post is about Mutter, which is a window manager, which should have very little to do with the app "ecosystem". They can, and should, do whatever the hell they want with Mutter, GNOME Shell, Nautilus/Files, etc. Even in the link you posted, they're talking…
Would you like to read what an Xfce developer said about GTK stewardship?[1][2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40568184 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40568042
This Xfce dev says that GTK4 is less capable than GTK3, and they feel that GTK5 will continue in that direction. They also acknowledge certain things in the first comment:
> [0] Full disclosure: I'm an Xfce developer, and have been disappointed with the direction GTK has been taking for some time. I don't begrudge them their prerogative to do what they need/want to achieve their own goals with the toolkit they've built and maintain. But it really is making life more difficult for me.
>
> [1] Part of the argument is that Wayland doesn't natively support things like cross-process embedding, so a cross-platform toolkit shouldn't have these types of widgets (the classic problem of only being able to support the lowest common denominator). But a) you can absolutely build something like that for Wayland (something I've been working on, though it requires tens of thousands of lines of code to do), and b) with other changes, it's incredibly difficult and possibly impossible to even implement the XEMBED protocol on GTK4, for people who do only care about X11.
If the GNOME guys took out stuff from GTK4 or 5 for bad reasons, then I don't like that, either. Which is basically exactly what I said. However, it sounds like some of these changes would be hard to do and maintain well, such as cross-process embedding. Perhaps the GNOME devs made a decision to focus their surely limited resources toward things they think will be long-lasting. And, perhaps, by their estimation, trying to support Wayland and X11 by adding (and maintaining) tens of thousands of lines of code would be a big burden--especially if they believe that X11 is not going to be super-relevant in the near future. I don't agree with that estimation, and I assume that it'll be a very long time before X11 isn't necessary anymore, but so be it.
All that said, it still has nothing to do with Mutter, which is why I replied to the comment that I did. Because GTK, and Mutter, and GNOME Shell, and GNOME apps, and non-GNOME GTK apps, are all different things, and this post was about Mutter.
Wayland is still years away from usable state. You still can't even autotype keepassxc passwords and there are still no good solutions for remote desktop sessions (at least I have not found any last time i checked)
Those are fair criticisms, but neither one of them is a dealbreaker for any OS that I use on a regular basis. As such, most Wayland sessions are perfectly usable to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I complain about Gnome driving away users with hostility, it's mainly their GTK stewardship I talk of. That, and things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off. Very out of touch.
Point taken on GTK, and I can't really disagree since I haven't even poked at writing a GTK GUI in many years. But, you still couldn't resist complaining about the UI implementations, which sounds more like complaints about GNOME apps and GNOME Shell. Who cares if you think that GNOME Shell looks like it accommodates touch screens? Firefox, for example, uses GTK and doesn't seem to look like a touch screen UI to me a…
Firefox has definitely been affected by this. The hamburger button is a touch paradigm which makes no sense on a large desktop screen with a mouse and keyboard-control scheme. It only serves to add more clicks to every interaction. Likewise the reduction of the scrollbar to a scroll indicator.
I was sad when Gnome 2 became Gnome 3 because I really liked Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 was broken. Then I moved on, but where ever I went insanity from the Gnome project kept leaking and making UIs worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm personally open to Wayland, and able to move to it (and sometimes have, though once I had to back it out because it was breaking too much in a critical factory embedded appliance) (and XMonad works noticeably better for me than i3wm/Sway). But not everyone can move to it. Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, an…
> When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop Already a decade ago, I commented on a news-for-nerds site like this one, “Well, GNOME makes choices we don’t like, but they are focused on the corporate-desktop market.” But then a GNOME developer replied to correct me: “That’s an old misconception, we are not mainly focused on the corporate desktop”…
Wayland is still years away from usable state. You still can't even autotype keepassxc passwords and there are still no good solutions for remote desktop sessions (at least I have not found any last time i checked)
… for you, surely. I’m sure there are some wayland users.
> autotype keepassxc passwords
What is that?
> remote desktop sessions
IIRC, gnome comes with an ootb RDP solution that, last I tried, worked as advertised. I’m not a big remote user though.