Linux Has Become Complicated And Limiting (GNOME, Wayland, etc)

22 Comments

1. I can feel you in a way, as when I was new to Linux, this was exactly what fascinated me. All the themes and desktop customisations, KDE 4 and its Plasmoid system was probably one of the reasons I switched to Linux.

   Now while the (Gnome-based) Linux desktop landscaped changed, I changed, too. When I started using Linux, I was a teenager. Now, I am a software developer, and I learned so many things about software testing, development best practices, discussing approaches with other people and learning that the end result of a discussion is often better than what you came up with. I now can't stand putting time into developing something without having tests, without thinking it through together with other people, and without having other people profit from that effort. That's why I stopped spending time modifying my own desktop, and started contributing more upstream. I'm using Gnome now, and I now enjoy it much more to contribute to a streamlined workflow, that a lot of people had thought trough, and use it myself as well as being assured that other people enjoy the same friction-less workflow. Instead of fixing issues on my setup, I try to contribute to fixing them in a broader scape, and prevent other people from having trouble in the first place.

   I personally don't need theming any more, as I really enjoy where Adwaita is heading currently. In this regard, however, I'm just lucky, I know there are other opinions and tastes.

   I think KDE Plasma still got you covered if you want to customise things. It's still extremely modular with its Plasmoid system and the themes.

2. Oh here it is that 14 years old video of Ubuntu 8.04

3. I wonder how many other people, like me, will be thinking "I thought I was the only person feeling this way". What we're seeing is the corporatization not only of linux, but of open-source. We've moved from a world where individuals write software and make it available to each other, to a world where more and more opensource software requires large teams and lots of time to develop and support. This allows corporations to capture large sections of the opensource space, because only corporations have the manpower to support these bloated projects.

4. @DistroTube I agree with your observation and unfortunately its more of an issue with corruption than anything else. In this sense of the word, I mean corruption to be taking something, changing it so you have less agency, and then calling it the same thing. Another way of putting it would be compulsion of users to use the software in a very specific way. Now I can understand some of the arguments for why, as supportability is something that must be considered with finite resources, but overall it seems like there's been a concerted effort over time to make Linux less than it was, and much of the core of linux maintainership hasn't changed but the people have, and at least some of them have conflicts of interest.

5. Gnome is really bad if you like to customize or have things in very certain way because they just make arbitrary changes and remove things that you maybe got used to. It's for people who start computer, browse internet, youtube etc and turn off computers lol.. I used to love gnome but the direction they are going, it just became unusable for me and I moved on.

6. It is difficult to write a Wayland compositor so we will not have many to choose from? How many X Windows servers did we have to choose from? Sounds like Wayland gives more choice.

7. Funny, in the past I once tried to work out how to have consistent keybindings for copy and paste for all graphical programs as well as the terminal in X windows. Very quickly I gave up as there was no way to stop keystrokes going to the wrong applications. More recently I set up exactly this short keybinding script that allows the correct copy and paste keystrokes to be sent to whatever program currently has focus. This was possible using a wayland compositor (dwl) that allowed me to capture keystrokes before they went to an application and replace them with the correct copy and paste bindings for the active application. There were plenty of broken things in old systems like X windows

8. I have to respectfully disagree. The phenomenon you are discribing is Linux maturing, and not only being an OS for the few nerds like us anymore.

   And to your fear, that Wayland will kill all innovation into different WMs. I would recommend you, to take a look at Hyprland 😉
   It looks slick af! 🙂

9. Is there a way to block this channel and all of your channels? This is the worst video I have ever seen. No content. No facts. Just simple rubbish. I try and hide this channel, but you just pop up with another one.

10. I think your title is very broad, but you mostly complain about the current state of Gnome which is just one DE out of 100s. I think Gnome is trying to make something that just works for the average user and is comfortable and I think they are succeeding in attracting new Linux users. The wonderful thing about OSS is that you don't have to stick with something you don't like. Always an alternative, but i think Gnome is the best entry point for a new user.

11. I daily drive wayland and it works fine wdym

12. I wholeheartedly agree that Linux is not what it once was. That is why I've moved on to FreeBSD and OpenBSD. OpenBSD holds great promise I think and each new release feels like an Ubuntu release of yesteryear with tons of enhancements!

13. There's FreeBSD, it's more simple. Also Gnome/GTK is possibly not much customizable, but there are like five tiling window managers, openbox+tint2+plank or polybar or whatever, where you can literally spend months customizing them and changing one for another. I guess, this is mostly content of this channel. Gnome is not Linux, I personally don't prefer it to anything (except budgie maybe) put it mildly.
    KDE is perfectly fine … except Qt licensing.

14. he's not wearing pants. funny until you realize he is wearing a diaper

15. The issue I have with most Wayland criticism is that they are more an issue of the ecosystem not yet being there than things being more complicated or impossible on Wayland (I mean, X ist very old and had lots of time to mature)

    Nothing stops one from just creating a very high-level compositor library or a compositor with its own WM-Api such that writing a Wayland "window manager" is just as easy as writing an X WM… It's just that nobody has done so yet. You could probably even write a compositor that acts just like a display server and have it implement a composition and WM api and design a similar ecosystem to X around it.

    But because compositors don't need an already there display server and do everything themselves, this allows them to be more flexible and do more things that have not been possible before, e.g. sub-compositors or proxy-compositors. Compositors can just use whatever method of displaying they want. Sway for example can itself run as a Wayland (or even X) client in another Wayland (or X) session. If you open a terminal and run `sway`, you'll see Sway just pops up in your current session as a normal window. This is heavily used by Cage and Gamescope (which is funny because Gamescope currently doesn't even work with Wayland clients and only works with XWayland). Or consider Greenfield which renders Wayland clients in the browser.

    Another thing that Wayland does that is actually a good thing for the Linux Desktop is their "policy not mechanism" philosophy by which instead of giving the client complete control of what it does, it instead communicates to the compositor what it's trying to achieve. Therefore the compositor has more control over its clients, resulting in way less ill-behaved clients. On X there are e.g. a lot of clients that fight with tiling WMs. On Wayland this should be less of an issue. It also makes clients more generalized, making them work by default in VR or mobile phone compositors without the client needing special support. It also allow compositors with completely new workflows e.g. NEWM which is optimized for laptops (and unfortunately unmaintained since last week).

    The flip side of this is obviously that Wayland needs extra protocols to support the features of clients that otherwise would be broken by the restrictions that Wayland by default puts onto clients. Many people blindly look at these broken features and say Wayland is broken although it again is only an issue of Wayland still being in development. It is insane of them to assume that an unfinished product just works with everything out of the box like it would in X which is, again, has been around for waaay longer.

    It is the same with their security policies where things like screen share and global hotkeys don't work and Wayland has to find a solution for this specific use case. But because they need/get special support, it allows them to be BETTER than when clients just do it themselves by everything going through a centralized unified interface (which are BTW AFAICT agnostic to the protocol and could even be implemented on X if the desktops wanted to). E.g. with Pipewire, you get the possibility of controlling also video streams of you captures, webcams etc. through a patchbay with the ability to include arbitrary steps in the pipeline, as you would with audio. With the global hotkeys portal, clients need to register every hotkey allowing the compositor/user to check every hotkey (for security) or even making the hotkey customizable at the compositor level. It also allows desktops to offer a menu in the settings (or a config file) of every global hotkey of all applications for users to view and customize.

    In general, I am very excited of what the Wayland ecosystem will offer in the future and providing a truly modern and still Linuxy experience.

    Some other of DT's comments:
    "With Xorg we have 100 different DEs and WMs to choose from." Again, X is also way older, of course there are more X WMs.
    "In Wayland it is a compositor and a WM all together and it's a mess." No, it is literally simpler and less of a mess with its unified design. I mean, why would they deliberately make something that is worse, wenn they think that X is messy? Also, the complexity has always been there, it just has always been hidden away from you in the X server and has over time become unmaintainable. Wayland is the only way forward.

    I don't want to accuse DT of falling for anti-Wayland propaganda but however it follows the same pattern of argumentation that you hear from people in these anti-Wayland circles…

    Sorry for the long rant, I hope you at least find it insightful if you managed it this far 🙈

16. So why is everyone so excited for Wayland? I know Nick from the Linux experiment is always talking about the lack of Wayland support, but not knowing what it was until this video and hearing that it sounds like it's not going to be that great, why do we need it? Is it really going to be that desired?

17. It would be nice having a desktop that you could use html knowledge to edit the look and feel.
    Like CSS and divs

18. I love KDE for the customizations you can do, Gnome seems like it's trying to move towards a standard that ideally could streamline some outdated code ect, but there seems to be a dropping of some of the tinkering that people who like to mess around on all settings available.

19. We need to go back to the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid ), make one tool for a specific problem but make that so it will work in tune with other things on your system, to do that we need basic protocols or guidelines for implementing new things.
    Who are going to take the hurdle to write evidence-based technical standards for simple and effective development for free? The community can do amazing things, but big companies can make a directed work with much more man-hours and organization, FOSS will always be my preference but the community hits limiting factors like communication and the quantity of people for developing a specific project.

20. This Is Because you are a GNOME Fanboy

21. yea, you're right about the compiz effects(desktop cube, minimize, close, open effects, etc.), there were TONS more amazing compiz effects back in the day than the few that survive today, if you still run compiz (Unity desktop, which is awesome, and i don't know what else, i guess MATE).

22. KDE suggests otherwise.

    Just ignore Gnome.

Comments are closed.