Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

---------------------------------

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

Not sure what Linux Desktop to use? Use this handy guide:

- GNOME: when you want no tray icons, themes that break every minor GTK release, and extensions for basic features (that are buggy.)
- KDE: pretty go-Segmentation Fault
- DWM/Awesome/i3/etc.: when you feel like the time you spent learning Vim wasn't wasteful enough
- XFCE: when you want one update per decade and poor Systemd support.
- LXQt: the biggest positive is that it doesn't use GTK.
- Cinnamon: when you like GNOME 3 but you want a different menu
- Deepin: when you want a desktop with the build quality of an HP laptop.

Aren't sure whether to use Xorg or Wayland?

- Xorg: if you want to absurdly fuck up your touchscreen, pick this one.
- Wayland: if you want to screw up most of your apps, too bad; this won't work with your proprietary drivers. If only it did.

What distro to use?

- Ubuntu: if you want to break your system with PPAs, check out this one.
- Debian: when you want Ubuntu except with more out of date packages
- Redhat: when you want Debian except with more out of date packages
- ElementaryOS: wait, someone actually made a properly designed Linux UI?
- Arch Linux: the only thing that doesn't make me sick anymore.
- Slackware: "that exists still really?"
- Gentoo: when you hate systemd more than waiting 4 days to compile Firefox on every release.

... I love Linux. I do. But it is very taxing to get things comfortable for me anymore. I feel like the Linux Desktop is in a period of flux and it's painful to be a part of right now.

Please stop recommending arch. For real. Stop!

Let's back up. I'm an arch user. Have been for years. I love arch! Like hardcore! But for real, cut it out.

Either they didn't ask and you're being obnoxious or they probably asked "what's a good distro to learn?" Or "Ubuntu holds my hand too much, I want something more consoley" either way, arch is not the answer. Arch is a distro for us stuck up types who like spending all day fixing dependency errors, changing our WM every other week, debating the merits of X vs wayland, and acting better than everyone else.

But here's the thing: I found arch because I wanted something that I could compulsively configure and get really in the weeds. I think most arch users feel that way to some degree. You kinda have to if you want to not be miserable. But many Linux users aren't like that. And that's fine! Let them use mint, or Debian. So they never change their DE. Cinnamon is a great interface! Gnome 2 is totally fine! There's literally nothing wrong with being content with sane defaults and not manually installing every package, and having scheduled releases from a stable source.

Do you tell 7th graders "if you really want to get better at algebra, you should try calculus. You really gain a deep knowledge of math!" No! They will get there when they are good and ready! Or not. It's not a beginner distro. In fact (controversial opinion ahead) it's pretty shitty at being a distro. I have used arch for years! But I don't recommend it to anyone. Because if you want to configure a box for literally 100s of hours (it's never really over is it?), Then you aren't asking anyone about distro recommendations. You've tried them all. You've heard of arch. You been to /r/unixporn.

Stop acting better than everyone else and stop telling people it's better than <other distro here>. It's not. It's different. Very different. And it's not for everyone.

*knock knock*
SIR do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior the WINDOWS UPDATE?
"uhm no sorry I'm busy"
*sees a bulldozer in the background*
"what the .."
SIR just let him in your heart and feel his security patches drive your vulnerabilities away!!
"but the rendering hasn't finished ye.."
TOO LATE SIR, green light fellas let's do this
*bulldozer destroys my house and i wake up, sweating*

*hugs laptop*
"Oooh Ubuntu my baby I've missed you soo much!"
*wayland crashes*

Just switched my girlfriend's laptop from Ubuntu 16.04 to Arch. Every single glitch and issue we were having is gone. She's even got some buttery smooth Wayland going.

One day, I decided to switch to Wayland. That marked the end of my screensharing.

So I've been using Antergos Linux as a way to ease myself into Arch.

Gnome apparently has moved to Wayland so I thought "Oh I don't need the Xorg window server anymore, let's just delete the Pacman package for that..."

Oh. Oh crap.

That was a mistake.
...Gnome is gone.

.... Guess I got my excuse to install vanilla Arch.

There are three words, which make me sad in combination:
KWin
Wayland
NVIDIA

No x-server, wayland. just drm and framebuffer. use computer just fine in this env. I can watch youtube and video. play music, play twitter, read rss, edit my program, surf a web, connect with other computer, view my image, read pdf with this freaking lightweight env.
Basicly, my super battery saver mode.
(want me to list all of these cli/tui app?)

X.Org is fucking old.

!!rant life toptags bottags
My tags seem to be okay. Let's go.
I'm 14. I live in a place where nobody smart lives, and the school I go to has no coders.
Last year, all my friends moved. The only friend I had left now hates me, simply because they yelled at me everyday and I yelled at them once.
I am in the middle of my exams. I also have the flu, but thankfully it's not the e-flu, otherwise you guys should prepare for 24/7 headaches.
Due to the medications I am taking, I'm half-asleep all the time, and I probably am messing up all of my grades.
My entire extended family is in India, and I go there 2 times a year. I miss them so much right now :(.
At the same as doing exams, I am trying to keep my laptop (primary) and PC (secondary, desk) configuration and setup approximately synchronized. In order to do that, I am setting up my dotfiles repository.
Except that all my laptop config (which works) is written horribly, and I need to rewrite it all.
At the same time, I have 3 other projects going on: An OS written in D, a source-based package management system written in D, a small website (not online), and a whatever's cooking in my mind at this moment.
Right now, I'm supposed to be studying for my French exam.
Instead, I'm here, typing this out on my phone.
I have a classmate in school who can type QWERTY at 80WPM. I'm learning Dvorak (Programmer's!) and my current speed is 33WPM, after about 2 months of half-hearted practise during work time and at school.
Sometimes, I look at the world we have here, and what we're doing to it, and I wish that sometimes we could simply be content with life. Let's just live, for once.
I find ~60 random songs in one go, simply by finding a song I know on YouTube and going to the 'Mix - <song>' playlist. I download them all (youtube-dl), and I listen to them. Sometimes, I find this little part in a song (Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us beginning instrumentals, or Safe and Sound chorus instrumentals) that make me feel so happy I feel like all's good in the world. Then the song moves on and with it, my happiness.
I look at Wayland, and X, and I think - Why can't we have one way of doing things - a fixed interface to express anything, so that one common API exists for everything of that type? And I realise it's because they feel that they're missing something from the others. Perhaps it's a bug nobody's solved or functionality that's missing, and they think that they can do better than that. And I think - Well, that's stupid. Submit a fucking bug report or pull request instead of reinventing the wheel. And then I realise that all the programming I've ever done in my life IS simply reinventing the wheel. And some might say, "Well, that guy designed it with spokes and wood. I designed it with rubber and steel," but that doesn't work, because no matter what how you make it, it's just a wheel. They both do the same thing. Both have advantages and disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. We're not perfect because we all have agendas and wants and likes and dislikes and hates and disgusts and all kinds of other crap, and our DNA's not perfect because it manages to corrupt copy operations (which is basically why we die of old age, I think).
And now I've lost my train of thought and this is too large to scroll over so I'm just going to move on to the next topic. At this point (.), I have 1633 letters left.
I hate the fact that the world's become so used to QWERTY because of stuff that happened 100 years ago that Dvorak is enough of a security to stop most people from being able to physically use my laptop.
I don't understand why huge companies like Google want to know about me. What would you do with this information? Know how to take over my stuff when the corporation-opocalypse comes around? Why can't they leave me alone? Why do I have to flash a ROM onto my phone so that Google cannot track me? What do you want, Google?
I don't give a shit any more, so there's my megarant.
Before anybody else (aside from myself) tells me that this is too big, all these topics are related simply because my train of thought went this way. There's a connection between each of these things, but I just don't know what it is.
Goodnight, world. 666 is the number of characters I have left. So is 42, for that matter (thanks, Douglas Adams!). Goodbye.

Archlinux
Sway
Alacritty
Neovim
Firefox
And there are Tons of open source projects underneath all of that, that you are not 100% aware of. (Wayland, gtk, qt, zsh, bash, sh, systemd, etc...)

CPU time? Wayland, or Linux.

I/O? Firefox or VSCode. If I'm pedantic about not counting dispatch as usage then VSCode because Firefox is just a mediator between me, the OS and the webapp at hand.

Kudos to Fedora for the 32 workstation release. It works as advertised on Lenovo laptops (even the new ones) OOTB, no issues.

Caveats: It's Wayland with Nvidia graphics disabled and has no fingerprint support, but that goes with the territory. Still an arch adherent personally, but it makes the office engineer laptop story significantly easier.

Sway is the best window manager.

Prove me wrong.

Wayland is pain.

I wanna rant about fucking Wayland today. Why the fuck can't I use my Bluetooth headphones in a google meet call! Jesus H Christ!!

At least the camera works! I should learn sign language...

Anyone a wine user?

I want to completely shake off Windows so I'm thinking of trying it again...

Has anyone tried it with a 970m + Wayland?

Today I tried running Plasma Wayland again after a few months...well...I tried

What did I experience?
- Mouse cursor size jumping from small to big randomly
- Can't remember fucking window positioning between multiple workspaces, so when I reboot, all windows are in the last workspace
- Random freezes with external monitor plugged in
- Firefox scrolling is absolutely terrible, 5 fps at most, but only when external monitor is connected
- Mouse acceleration can't be completely turned off? Or the setting just didn't work? IDK
- Sometime I get the infamous window trail effect known from older Windows versions, but on mouse cursor

Sircmpwn's sway wm, an i3 clone for Wayland, I love i3 but I'm also an advocate for the ditching of xorg. (Close to beta)

Honorable mention for anbox which tries to do a similar thing Google is doing to run Android apps natively in Linux. (Alpha)

I was about to have a screenshare presentation of a month-long work over Skype...

Hours before the presentation I got bored and upgraded from Xorg to Wayland for some reason the universe doesn't want to disclose...

Tried to call a friend to check if everything is working and the screenshare feature was missing! 😑 I thought Skype fucked up, tried Hangouts, still not working, tried praying to saint Ubuntu to somehow please let it work one time. It did fucking not.

My gosh, 30 minutes before the presentation and I was preparing the whole environment on Windows. I had never felt so stressed in my life! 😰

Investigating after the presentation informed me that screensharing only works on XOrg, not on Wayland.
Worst last-minute decision ever. *#-##-:$;"+3($(!#@/)#9"+(2(#

It's really strange to me that display servers/window managers (Xorg, Wayland, etc) aren't locked to given desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, Unity, Cinnamon, etc). It doesn't make sense to me that they are separate and not optimized together.

Up until now, I never had any breaking updates on Linux on my laptop, Except for Nvidia drivers stopping. It would switch to noveau. Even my cobbled together hack of Broadcom Bluetooth solution worked without even having to touch it. Well, I still don't have problems with core Linux but add gnome to the issue mix today. Surprisingly, Nvidia drivers for the first time Nvidia drivers upgraded (to 340) and I didn't had to do anything for it to work. Gnome deprecated synaptics driver support and now uses libinput implementation for it. Well Ubuntu Gnome updater won't clean the configuration and I had to remove the driver and clean config myself. Nothing too much, i have to deal with these stuff on my arch installation but Ubuntu has been "it works fine. No need to interfere" thing for me. It works fine on Wayland (it always used libinput on Wayland a if I am correct) but nvidia drivers doesn't support Wayland. And then since the update gnome has been disabling some of my extensions at random. All on X. I have no problems with Wayland except for Nvidia fucking drivers. All that said, its still better than windows where I lost fucking network connectivity during something important. And the trackpad drivers on Linux are somehow much better than anything I have used on windows. (that or Sony made fucking great trackpads and nobody noticed). Here's to hoping Nvidia starts supporting drawing on Wayland and I can ditch X completely. I have seen visible improvements in performance under load and slight decrease in battery usage with Wayland.

Here's a question. Should i go Wayland with Weston or stick with X? I'm setting up Arch Linux as a webserver, probably with Cinnamon. Won't do much else with it.

Someone please explain to me what Wayland and Xorg are

I just got my first 17in laptop. It's a dell XPS 9700. I wiped it and installed Arch Linux within minutes of unboxing! lol. I just finished and we're at 6 hours from delivery (4 hours of beer drinking and) 2 hours of config later, I'm posting on devrants. Everything but the audio and nvidia graphics worked OOTB. I'm still working on getting nvidia prime working on Wayland. Tips welcome!

why this fucking nvidia has to come up with its lady drama, ffs mf fragile egoistic gpu.

Fucking EGLStream. Also fuck GBM API, nothing works. shitfuck shit.

There's no way I can have a multi gpu hotswapping with wayland?? are you retardedly crazy bitch ass nvidia. I am tired of this shit.

Why do I have to rely on some other platform? I paid for what? fuciking nothing. This is absurdly fucking trash

Arch switch update: after a day I still haven't gotten past sddm. KDE won't start on either X or Wayland with no logs in sight. Everything worked in VB.

I started a rice after 3 years of happily using KDE, and apparently everything uses CSS for styling now? I'm not complaining, Polybar offered like 4 options and we just played around with glyph fonts, compared to that this is a joyride.

Also, Eww is brilliant. I've seen people make full fucking UIs and custom notification centers and shit with it. I don't have that much time on my hands, but the option is there. All this with janky Lisp and Sass.

Eww also confirmed a suspicion of mine regarding Orchid; language adoption is a matter of convenience. I can get people to learn my language by offering cool trinkets and useful tools to people who have a predisposition to learning. Yuck is an aptly named language but it's not totally unusable, and because I had to learn it to make my status bar I'm now more inclined to write the corresponding scripts in it as well and I'm actually quite disappointed that I have to use Bash for that.

Is anyone using Wayland with KDE-Plasma environment already? I'm still waiting for this to work on my laptop. X doesn't support multi-monitor scaling which I desperately need

Let's be real a second, hiDPI and multiple DPI display support on GNU/Linux (xorg) sucks.
It apparently has better support through Wayland but I hate gnome3 (does KDE implements Wayland? don't really care I don't like it too, way too heavy)

Following are the only real problems I had with my XFCE Manjaro (I guess essentially XFCE problems). My question is, is it just me?

Touchpad problems:
The synaptics deprecation kinda f'ed me up.
I tried sticking to synaptics, but I had an issue where if I connected a usb mouse the touchpad would sometimes stop working (it's deprecated after all).

So I switched to libinput. The default movement feels good (synap felt kinda slippery)... but then... NO COASTING/KINETIC SCROLLING in a lot of apps? WTF?!
Would kinetic scrolling work in general if I switched to a wayland based DE?

The alt tab has a delay:
you would expect one of the most lightweight DEs to have near instant switching. But no, I have like almost full second delay, and for the life of me I can't find the way to customize it.

Thr battery management is kinda stupid. Even though I set the thing to hibernate or sleep in low battery it never does.

Since there are so many Arch users, what kind of desktop environments are you running? I've been running Gnome3/Wayland and it's awesome, although I get a bit of screen tear, but it's tolerable.

!rant
Stupid licensing issue.
I have a licensing question/problem.
I'm porting Lemonbar (the fancy GNU/Linux X11 statusbar) to D (which is awesome imo).
I'm adding Wayland functionality and since D is part of the C syntax family some code is just about exactly the same (the XCB libs are protocol-generated external imports).
Also, the X-specific parts are in a specific file.
What do I license the project against? My own license (I prefer Apache) or Lemonbar's? What about the X-specific file?
BTW, it's a full rewrite using the same concepts, object-orienting the whole thing.

Okay, so debian is just fucked by default then.

Created a Debian 10 persistence stick, and I'm having the fucking xorg issues ("No screens detected", xrandr says the same) i've had every fucking time i've installed debian, except a simple round of dpkg-reconfigure isn't fixing it this time.

Suggestions?

Things tried:

- dpkg-reconfigure <every package even remotely related>
- X -configure
- installing all firmware from linux-firmware repo
- reinstalling everything remotely related (with both reinstall and purge/install)
- Wayland ("failed to create compositor backend")
- creating my own xorg configs and driver-radeon configs and all that shit with my screen explicitly defined
- remaking the stick with a redownloaded ISO
- actually installing it to a HDD first
- crying in frustration
- different monitors
- someone else's machine (both AMD GPUs, mine's an R9 380, his an RX 3-digit something-or-other)
- an NVIDIA card (other tester threw his old 1080TI in his PC, set up all the drivers and shit, and nothing fucking changed)

what is this, Fedora?