It Will Never Be the Year of the Linux Desktop

It feels nowadays that if someone genuinely puts the effort into untangling a codebase, fixing the long-standing issues and navigating the maze of legacy paths, the backlash and politics around it leaves the project deflated and unappreciated. The reaction around Xlibre shows how hostile these situations can become. Personally, I still prefer Xorg in many ways, even if Wayland is technically the newer direction.

FOSS was a powerful ideological concept in the 90s when most software was proprietary and corporate-controlled. The 2000s felt like real growth and experimentation. Today, a lot of it feels fragmented, cynical, and increasingly institutionalized. Another problem with FOSS is that projects usually end up in one of a few states, a strong “dictator” model where someone drives the direction through sheer effort and resources, a loose community model where everything gets patched together by committee or eventual corporate stewardship.

Or someone gets frustrated enough to fork a project, but then these forks are often treated socially as hostile when that was the core ideology of FOSS.

A lot of modern “FOSS” infrastructure are effectively: corporate-funded, corporate-prioritized or community-accessible rather than community-directed. It's free in the sense of that you can download the source, compile it yourself but for yourself to contribute unless you have the resources, is hard and time consuming. So you end up following the path it's taking.

If the corporations benefiting from these ecosystems consistently reinvested back into the communities maintaining them the FOSS landscape would look very different if not more healthier, more sustainable, and far less bitter.

We have seen a bigger push to get everything using XDG config dirs in recent years, and also getting everything working on Wayland. These to me seem similar, other than that this accessibility standard would be even more niche, and if it was stated upfront to be made with AI in mind, I think there would be resistance.

Personally I do not want to let an AI tool run loose on my machine, but I do like having ways to script and automate stuff. I like Sway's IPC and that every keybind is also a command you could run. So the explanation of Apple's accessibility stuff sounds cool. I wish I had something like Unity's HUD where I could use a search to select from any depth of graphical menus in a given program instead of having to poke around by hand. If the accessibility standard were like that and allowed more stuff to be done from the CLI more easily, that would be great.

15.1 (due out next week) is their first big laptop focused release from the recent grant money. They have a list of current laptops that they test with for you to buy.

Barring that, Devuan Linux is not bad either, and is still a cohesive system.