> All I want is init scripts and X11, but the horizons are shrinking. I've already compromised with systemd, and I don't like it. I see BSD in my future
Freedesktop wants to kill X11 and are working continuously on that, to the point if rejecting patches and banning developers.
Popular desktop environments are increasingly depending on Linux-only things. KDE has officially removed support for FreeBSD in Plasma login manager (because of logind dependency).
Gnome 50 plans to obsolete X11 completely.
If you want that simple, bright future of yours, you’ll have to fight/work for it.
There is a difference of opinion. Freedesktop wants to "stabilize" X11. That does mean that they do not want to evolve Xorg. However, it does not mean that you cannot keep using it or that they are going to take it away. In fact, it is still being maintained and will be for a long time.
You can interpret the rejecting of patches and banning of developers as political. However others see the rejection and banning as protecting the stablity that is the goal.
If your goal is for Xorg to evolve and not to stabalize (fair), you may prefer Xlibre as a project.
Phoenix looks pretty cool too.
KDE Plasma and GNOME are trying to kill X11. Or, at least, they do not want to maintain support for it in their projecs. And COSMIC did not bother to add support for X11 at all. That will probably be the trend on desktop Linux.
> Freedesktop wants to kill X11 and are working continuously on that, to the point if rejecting patches and banning developers.
Are you referring to the developer of Xlibre, who submitted multiple broken patches & kept breaking ABI compatibility for little to no reason[0]? Or someone else?
I’m talking about that developer, yes. And I’m sure there’s more to the story than just ABI compatibility.
He wanted X11 to thrive. Freedesktop however has a goal for Wayland ultimately to replace X11, right? X11 should die. This is not hyperbole. It’s a stated goal.
So I think there’s more to the story than the simplified ABI aspect often mentioned here on HN.
We don't have to guess, the PRs & history are still there. You could easily go through them and find examples of the project members being unreasonable about ABI compatibility.
My go to example would be long lasting issues with SMB support in Finder. All operations are very slow, the search is almost unusably so. The operations that are instant on every non-Apple device take ages on a Mac. I first ran into these issues 7 years ago when I set up my NAS, and they present to this day. I tried all random suggestions and terminal commands, but eventually gave up on trying to make it perform as it does on Linux.
With Apple's focus on cloud services, fixing the bugs that prevent the user from working with their local network storage runs contrary to their financial incentives.
Ubuntu releases supported (aka "really supposed to work") versions much more frequently than Debian, or I would have switched already. As it is, I just make the appropriate changes to purge Snap and run Firefox from a Mozilla apt repo and Thunderbird from Flatpak via Flathub.
You are talking about Debian stable which is released approximately once in 2 years.
People who want to have more (most ?) recent software on Debian should go for Debian Testing. Or Debian Sid, which gets upstream updates almost instantly but requires more Linux knowledge in case something gets broken.
Could this be due to how Windows vs Linux does process scheduling on CPUs with P- and E-cores?
To my knowledge Linux isn’t that capable on BIG.little architectures, and Linux power-management (as this intersects with) has always left a little to be desired - when comparing battery life to Windows.
Disclaimer: pure speculation. Possibly misinformed :-D
> To my knowledge Linux isn’t that capable on BIG.little
Android uses Linux as it kernel and runs on billions of devices with heterogeneous cores. Linux had this capability for way longer than Windows did; Windows for the most part did not run on devices with heterogeneous cores until the Intel Alder Lake (12th gen) CPUs.
Win11 outperformed Linux at Alder Lake release too [1] but eventually this changed and Linux was better on Meteor Lake [2]. Probably Arrow Lake has some microarchitectural changes which do not mesh well with Linux's core scheduling logic which Intel will need to fix, at which point Linux will probably close the gap again.
> Android uses Linux as it kernel and runs on billions of devices with heterogeneous cores. Linux had this capability for way longer than Windows did; Windows for the most part did not run on devices with heterogeneous cores until the Intel Alder Lake (12th gen) CPUs.
The extra capabilities of Android come from custom patches from Qualcomm kernels. They are so far diverged from the mainline, it is really really hard to merge it back. They not only add drivers but patch the kernel itself. Windows NT can have hints for thread scheduling from the userspace since they control Win32. Now the question becomes is there a way to patch Glibc and all other system libraries on Linux to give equal information to Linux kernel. Of course Linux kernel can guess but it is a lossy information channel.
Yep I suspect this too from the benchmarks. The linux kernel doesn't send the instructions to the right cores and likely sees them all as the same and not 'high power' vs 'low power' cores
> It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streaming has lead to some interesting outcomes.
I think carefully curating music was something we did when music was a scarce commodity. Our collection was limited by how much we could afford to acquire. As such, acquiring the right stuff become a valued skill, not only for DJs, but for music enthusiasts just playing music at home.
Streaming killed all that. For 99.9% of the people out there, streaming has all they need and will ever need, at a fixed cost. It's absolutely abundance.
So the skill of curating music as a human activity went out the window as well, because there's no cost in playing the wrong track and deciding you didn't like it, before moving to the next item in your AI-generated playlist.
Put bluntly: How people discover music isn't important. At least not anymore.
> What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth.
It was quality in technical quality of the audio in the files, but also in the organization and sourcing of the material, the QA-process of the encoding - down the the specific release the audio-file was from.
There was quantity, sure, but that was secondary to the quality. The quantity was just a side-effect of the place being known for quality, making it an attractive arena to participate in.
And it also had all the "weird"/non-standard things you don't find on mainstream streaming-services precisely because that is what independent curators are good at and often driven by.
This Anna's release... While in itself impressive in many ways does not compare to the things What.CD represented. It's almost the exact opposite:
- focus on most popular content - niche content (even by mainstream Spotify-standards) is not included
- quality is 160kbps ogg files, which is far from lossless, it's not tightly coupled to a release and even as so far the audio-grading goes, there's no transparent QA process for the content, nor is it available in audiophile fidelity.
Its the usual deal from the that crowd:
- when the left does it, it’s just them using their civil liberties
- when the right does it, its illegal manipulation, election interference, fascism and/or Russian disinformation.
It’s the same crowd which keeps using the phrase “our democracy”.
Behaviour like this really makes me wonder who they are, and who they deem not worthy to be included in “their” democracy.
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