Which one? The only thing mentioned by name here is gnome.

To test a very stubborn program I had to install windows in a VM and use it for 20 minutes yesterday. It felt like I was swimming in a swamp located at the exit pipes of a factory that exclusively produce shit and deadly biohazard material.

You can put your taskbar in the middle of the screen if you so desire!

The beauty of an open system is that you can do pretty much whatever you want in it.

The horror of an open system is that you can do pretty much whatever you want in it.

Interesting. Their website would make me run away fearing it’s from a cheap fake download button scam from ten years ago, but the software itself looks pretty legit.

It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It’s just a rhetoric that was jokingly pushed on back when communication wasn’t worldwide, immediate, and lacking context. It has now been repeated ad-nauseam by people that have no idea of why it was said in the first place.

Some GUI tools are efficient. Some CLI tools are efficient. Sometimes, both are efficient. It depends on the tool AND the task at hand. Unless you’re taking internet memes at heart, then use whatever.

Well, to be honest, I do sometimes mock (in a friendly manner) some coworker that are using GUI almost exclusively. The only reason I do that is because the exact same task could be accomplished in a fraction of the time with minimal CLI knowledge. But even then, it gets the job done.

If you actively edit/delete some system files non-essential for boot, but that would break some integrated features, sure. But random corruption of protected system files? If that happens, you’re not fixing anything without changing your storage and/or the rest of the hardware anyway.

Simple things can work well in GUI.

Now, working on a GUI that tries to expose every little features? No thank you. I would not want to develop it, and I would not want to have to use it.

It’s ok to go install a software through discover instead of using the CLI.

Technically, all the boot options were on the same drive (same EFI partition, on the disk that was initially used for years by windows), but for some reason, the motherboard decided “nope, there’s no bootloader there”.

I ended up repartitioning the “first” drive seen by the bios to make a 100MB partition at the beginning, named it “EFI system partition”, copied all the content of the old one from the other drive, and nuked the actual windows install in the process (not the boot entry though). Now all is good… I hope :D

Weird. I understand you did have issues, but that’s so far from my experience. Despite major annoyance at the project’s direction, I’m staying on ubuntu because it’s been a mostly stress-free experience as a user (and I have an nvidia card, which does NOT help in that regard…).

Might be off topic, but does anyone else dread the outcome of their Linux system after an update?

Not really. I don’t really worry about that on most of my system. There is ONE computer where an update is a source of stress, and that’s my main gaming computer where I had to setup dualbooting with windows. I learned the hard way that my motherboard implementation of UEFI kinda want windows to be there, otherwise it’s very picky into which disk is parsed for EFI boot entries. But beyond that, nah. Laptop, desktop, company servers… just roll the update/upgrade, and the dist-upgrade when needed, fix the updated configs (for servers) and it’s good to go. Been this way for the last decade or so.

Worthy of note, I’m on ubuntu LTS (24.04 for now) or Debian stable (for servers), so not exactly outdated (I have the latest nvidia drivers…) but not bleeding edge either. I probably avoid a lot of issues this way.

I have no idea when it happened, but there’s a mechanism in place to download updates but only install them on reboot, kinda similar to windows, but when you want instead of when it want. It’s kinda the best of both world : updates are quick to install, downloaded in the background, and no workflow interruption.

These days I might do that. The thing is, I’m coming from a situation where windows was installed, fully setup and configured with whatever I needed, so it was way easier to just run that than to redo everything and setup a VM.

Also, the last piece of software I need is something used to bypass DRMs, and it kinda requires the whole thing to work flawlessly. I’ll see when I come around to launch it again if it’s viable.

That’s not a thing it can do in grub. It could do it with UEFI entries, but these days windows is not the biggest culprit of that. I had it happen on a BIOS update, where it simply nuked all stored entries, and the windows one is always checked as part of the standard.

That’s a bit extreme. I keep a windows install around, just in case. It’s just not in grub; I have to get into the bios boot menu and manually select it.

It mostly did, yes. But when a big issue pops up, X still gets the occasional patch.

And, since this is a bit of a hot topic it seems, that sounds fair to me. X is the past, wayland is the future. I’m just annoyed at people glossing over the reasons not everyone can move on.

While it’s certainly winded down over time, XOrg is still maintained. Last fix was released in september 2025. Is it enough? It never is. But that’s not really an argument to move from “working” to “not working as well” for now.

Yeah, I know of such “solution”. But what is the point of forcing the change when it doesn’t bring me tangible benefits, brings significant downsides, and only some of these downsides have half-useful workarounds?

I have no problem with whether wayland existing or it becoming the new standard, but forcing people to move in these circumstances seems a bit silly, especially when some issues stem from people having hardware from one manufacturer that represents around 75% of general consumer systems (according to Steam survey, which might or might not be representative but sure brings a lot of people).

Thankfully, at least with the distributions I use, switching back and forth is trivial. But given the circumstances, I don’t really understand the extremely heavy push.

What are you talking about? You can copy-paste from Terminal programs to GUI programs and vice-versa like everywhere else (with the terminal of course needing CTRL + SHIFT + C / V, which as we know is historical to Unix terminals). I’m doing that for years, so does my family. It works just fine.

I’m not talking about copy/pasting from the terminal emulator, thank you very much. Just run VIM and have it copy/paste from the global clipboard without setting up esoteric, sometimes DE-dependent stuff, and you’ll understand.

And bringing up Nvidia now really is bending down backwards to paint Wayland as bad while it’s painfully obvious it’s the driver’s fault.

Sure. I did not say it was wayland fault. Or anyone else, really. I explained why some people could not “just move on to wayland already you nincompoop” with very tangible issues that still prevent them from doing so. Who is at fault is of no consequence here. If I switch to wayland, I lose features, I have a broken desktop, and throwing away thousands of equipment because “it’s the future” does not sound that great. It’s just a matter of fact. Whether it’s wayland’s fault, plasma’s implementation’s fault, nvidia’s fault, or anyone else’s is irrelevant to the user experience here.

People can’t go “stop using X and use wayland”, and ignore raised issues by saying “no, that issue you’re having is not a big issue”, “that issue you’re having is not wayland’s fault”, “that issue you’re having does not concern most people”, etc. And reading replies in this thread, it seems people have a hard time imagining circumstances beyond their own.

That sounds more like escape sequence not being interpreted, but maybe? It’s a mess.

Basically, in some implementations (it’s true for at least KDE Plasma), the console app is never seen as “active” (the terminal emulator is), and as such can’t access the clipboard, something like that. There’s third party program you can use, and plugins for things like VIM, but when you get a step further with remote clipboard it’s even worse. And even when solutions exists, there’s weird caveat like “it will work all the time except if you’ve clicked somewhere in the past few seconds” or something.

I’m sure things will improve over time, but “we’re not there yet”.