this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 117 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I just hope Wayland has its accessibility shit together before then. There are people that still need to use X11 for their accessibility needs.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 week ago (1 children)

last time I checked, blind users could not even install any mainstream distro anymore, because they all switched to wayland, and that broke screen readers in the installer.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (12 children)

Yeah. I'm sad to say that, about a year ago, I switched back to macOS because it handles accessibility waaaaay better. And I don't even use screen readers. It sounds like their situation is even worse :/

I just need the ability to easily zoom in and out using Super+scroll up/down (without causing performance issues or visual jank) and trackpad gestures that aren't extremely limited. Granted, both of these things may be more of a DE thing, but wherever the issue lies, I would like them fixed.

[–] kmacmartin 12 points 1 week ago

KDE let's you do that first one, though it's ctrl+super. It's one of my favourite lesser known features.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 week ago

Fr, accessibility is def important and they’re not giving it enough attention

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

GTK 4 released 9 years after GTK 3, so it'll be quite some time before GTK 5. If Wayland doesn't have better accessibility than X11 at that point it'd be time to give up on it as a project, and maybe desktop Linux as a whole.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

GTK+4 was released? When??

I've been compiling GTK+3 3.2x, the latest stable version about ten years ago and always wonder will they ever advance the major version. Years of installing XFCE4 and stuff and I always saw them pulling GTK+3 as a dependency. Never seen GTK+ marked 4 though.

To be fair I haven't visited their official website for a while though.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

GTK 4 was released in 2020, they also dropped the plus from the name in 2019. GTK 4 is a big update and would be a pretty massive amount of work to switch to. I don't know when, if ever, XFCE will switch to it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Yup, considering they deprecated so many functions and removed them I'd imagine switching would be really hard.

Even while writing my new projects in gtk4 (tiny projects) I run into problems of many solutions no longer working because the functions are removed without any replacements.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Also I've found some games that work fine in Wine under X11 and not in Wayland

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The future is now old man. KDE next.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It's a shame because my 11yo laptop runs beautifully on X11 but terribly on Wayland with KDE. I hope the issues with Wayland optimization work out on my laptop before I'm forced to switch

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

I really wish Wayland was more fleshed out & stable before all of this happened. Color management isn’t even yet finalized & putting accurate colors on the screen is like the most important part.

I really wish Arcan were further along.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

It actually was merged just few days ago, I mean the color management protocol

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I s2g im gonna become one of those psychos who runs the oldest Debian that still gets security updates behind a pfsense with whitelisting.

[–] caseyweederman 31 points 1 week ago (2 children)

You already said Debian. The rest is redundant.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Please forgive me, as a Debian user I’m prone to senior moments and will soon have my driving license legally revoked.

[–] caseyweederman 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's okay. That's how you know how stable we are.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Debian users are so stable, that they're not allowed on planes.

Debian users are so stable, that the Higgs boson was only found once thet had left the room.

I have more mild disses.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Stares in Debian Testing. (Though I use Bookworm on my laptop, probably soon to be Trixie. Nice thing about Trixie is I'll no longer have to use the Backports kernel on my Thinkpad and can just stay on the LTS one.)

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

I'm using a 49" monitor and dividing it up in virtual X11 monitors/screens for flexibility. Running a tiling window manager with lots of virtual desktops, but with fullscreen support separate monitors are still needed. Wayland are still missing the support for dividing up the display, which is probably the last thing keeping me on X11.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Let's just hope XFCE can finish the transition before then. If not, I am not looking forward to having to shop for a new DE.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

XFCE is still using GTK 3, why would they care what Gnome does with GTK 5? Nobody but Gnome is even using GTK 4.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not necessarily - pavucontrol switched to GTK4, and there are a lot of other applications that I use that are on it as well. If XFCE stays on X11, I wouldn't be able to run any application that updates to GTK5 (except through some hack like running Weston nested in X, which I used to do when I used Waydroid).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

It's true that there are some apps not directly associated with any DE that have moved to GTK4. If GTK5 actually was likely to come out any time soon you might have to worry about finding alternatives when they switch to GTK5. That being said though, GTK3 had been out for over 9 years before GTK4 came along, there were 4 years between the "last" version of GTK3 and GTK 4.0.0, they're still in the "oh, this is what we'll probably do when we release GTK5" phase of development, XFCE has already made a bunch of progress porting everything over to Wayland, and DE agnostic apps are less likely to switch over right away if mid-size DEs like XFCE and Cinnamon still don't have good Wayland support. I wouldn't stress out about it too much.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The lack of proper tablet support in wayland prevents me from being excited for this. I wish there was more news on that front.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

You mean like Wacom tablets? I’m curious to know what’s missing. I’ve been using one of those XP Pen tablets on GNOME and Wayland without much issue. I’m using it for writing more than drawing though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I mean, my issue is that most buttons on my huion are still non bindable, and some graphical interfaces cannot be interacted with in mouse mode and only register as touch. Lastly, occasionally programs completely ignore pen sensitivity, such as blender.

This experience was when I was last on gnome. I've been on budgie for a while as a result of needing a tablet for my hobbies.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As much as I love Wayland, they really should keep support for those who have to use X11.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

By the time GTK5 appears, a vanishingly small percentage of Linux users will need X11.

I run Wayland on 2009 hardware now.

As toolkits abandon X11, it is going to pressure other operating systems to move to Wayland as well.

FreeBSD is already moving. Even Haiku has Wayland support. So we are talking about the smaller BSDs and the Solaris derivatives. Or ancient operating systems on original hardware I guess. In which case, they can run the older apps which is likely all they can run anyway.

Worst, worst case, you can run Wayland on x11. If there is something you absolutely need, I guess you can run Wayland apps on x11 that way.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Will QT 7 Do the same?

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