Please wait...
Funny this comes right after I switched to FreeBSD. It is
blazing fast, faster than anything else I have tried, so it is
probably what I will stick with.
I wonder if this is going to cause a biggie split at some point. Linux is moving steadily towards Wayland and FreeBSD is still on X11. Supporting both could eventually turn into a "cross platform" type of thing, where applications have a unix-like core but different display front ends for Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS. Qt and GTK currently support both, and probably will continue to do so for a long time.
There's a part of the world that just wants to keep away from the mainstream platform as an end in itself, regardless of the relative merits of various operating systems. In the early 1990s when Linux was a scrappy upstart, those people flocked to Linux. Now that Linux owns the data center and is finally starting to get a foothold on the mainstream desktop, we'll see people of that type of mindset moving to FreeBSD and others.
And all of this is ok!
I have had the same thought a few times. But i don't think it will in practical terms.
1 - BSDs are rather niche, no marketing, the masses don't even know they exist. Even a lot of IT people i know, really dont really understand what it is. They are too young. "that old UNIX thing.. whatever"
2 - Drivers..Can only reverse engineer so much and it takes time, so are always behind the curve. ( not their fault, reality ) ( this is the reason i left the camp decades ago.. WiFi was awful..and later i needed CUDA.. ). Of course Linux had issues too in the beginning ( but less than FreeBSD ), but now that hardware makers pretty much provide native drivers now, its a non-blocker.
3 - Desktop apps.. Once you have mainstream browsers drop X11, wayland becomes almost a necessity in practical terms. The unwashed masses need web to watch their 15 second cat videos. ( hell, even us IT people, most of what we access are web front ends now.. When was the last time any of us developed a 'fat' client? So if you are running wayland on BSD, what is the practical difference to the average user?
4 - Cash. The big Linux ( and of course Microsoft ) players have the cash to keep it going this direction. Apple too, i guess could, but they have their garden now, and dont really care about anyone else it seems. Sort of ironic, they suck now, but they are not trying to manipulate the rest of us..
Sure, 'insiders' can always go that route, and some will ( until #3 takes hold, that may destroy desktops.. and it goes back to servers as its focus ), but the average person, the 'market' so to speak, wont.
Fri Jul 04 2025 14:17:09 UTC from IGnatius T FoobarI wonder if this is going to cause a biggie split at some point.
I wonder if this is going to cause a biggie split at some point.
Linux is moving steadily towards Wayland and FreeBSD is still on X11.
Supporting both could eventually turn into a "cross platform" type of
thing, where applications have a unix-like core but different display
front ends for Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS. Qt and GTK currently
support both, and probably will continue to do so for a long time.
At least on OpenBSD, you can see a lot of wayland related work done in the mailing list. That said, I don't think they are making a hard switch anytime soon regarding their main display service.
I can't get too upset about this stuff. I got that out of my system 20 years ago where it seemed that every time the open source world turned a corner there was an impending disaster that was going to destroy it, that was going to put the genie back into the bottle. Compared to the effort it took to survive Microsoft, the effort required to survive Reich Hat is going to be far easier. Sorry IBM, you don't get to go back to the 1970s.
Linux's kernel is GPL, and its userland can be recomposed (as the uutils people are currently proving). There's too much value there for the community/industry as a whole to go back to the dark ages. Over the last few decades we've proven that we can and do work completely around anyone who tries to close off access to key components.
I believe Debian still supports it. ( and thus derivatives )
I prefer lxde myself. Just enough desktop to get the job done, but not get in the way.
Sat Jul 05 2025 21:22:48 UTC from SouthernComputerGeekLast time I checked FreeBSD supports Wayland. I'm still using X11 because I like the Mate Desktop.
Either they changed their mind, or i mis-understood, but i thought Debian was forbidding any AI code contributions.. Not that i have an issue with the concept of course, as long as IP rights do not come and bite us in the ass.. Would only take one rich company being run by a jerk to sue an OSS project out of existence, or set it back years t the least ( anyone remember AT&T and BSD? ) . Even if the OSS project was 100% in the clear, they can lose due a war of attrition. Only so much cash to spend.
"Debian developers have also been discussing a budget or sponsorship for making use of AI/LLM in their Debian workflows either for help with code completion, technical documentation writing, and similar. For that they may pursue OpenAI's Open-Source Fund so Debian developers would be able to make use of ChatGPT and similar for those that want to leverage large language models / AI to help with their Debian contributions"
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-More-Newcomers-LLMs
Saw this story too ( from the feed )
I agree. IBM used to suck, bad. Then it became "OK" then back to suckage. I suspect the "OK" period was due to them trying to pretend to be nice, as competition was eating them alive. And while no one was looking being the curtain, they were leveraging the fake good-will and posturing to being back in control ( if they could )
Most of these people's stuff, i tend to agree with. ( tho not fond of the 'everyone else is Nazi' mentality )
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This weekend we published a couple of articles related to this [1, 2]. The core argument was, for society to be better off it needs to be inoculated against bad people. Self-governance was revisited on US Independence Day when we argued that "independence in the digital realms means abandoning platforms like GitHub, not just rejecting proprietary software". There's also a message somewhere in there about IBM and Wayland, not to mention the fan club of Microsoft GitHub. It's called Rust. See, "Wayland People" and "Rust People" want us to think that GIAGAM (GAFAM+IBM) will lead the way and we'll all be followers. For half a decade already Rust even banned or censored Microsoft critics. That's how bad it is.
After Igor Ljubuncic complained that Wayland wasn't ready and we should not follow, based on his famously extensive reviews, he wrote another piece. To quote portions of what he said: "Recent news in the Linux world around the forced deprecation of the X11 session in upcoming Gnome and, consequently, Ubuntu releases prompted me to write this article. [...] I feel sad and alarmed, and I want to take a look at the Linux tech landscape, to see where we are, why we are where we are, and if perhaps the future holds anything good and bright and meaningful for the Linux folks. Let's chat [...] I love me a good mystery. Although I'm not happy and I'm rather worried about the direction the Linux home desktop is going, AKA forced deprecation of X11 before its would-be successor Wayland is truly ready, there's some small joy in telling a good story, replete with numbers. Indeed, after I published my Plasma 6.4 review, which showed Wayland being less optimized even for truly basic stuff, I decided to dig in and expand more on that early test and its troubling findings."
Hours ago Stevie Wonder said "we have the opportunity to lead [...] for everyone [for people] to be fairly treated".
IBM grew a lot when it worked on eugenics (flagging people like Stevie Wonder to "save us" from mixed-race couples). That even predates IBM's work for actual nazis. IBM was never a nice company. It's not a good leader. Forget about "Red Hat". It's dead. This is IBM. Stop accepting IBM's decisions and instead focus on what people like Theo say. "The writing has been on the wall a very long time," he said about "Gnome is dropping X11", "that some people believe their role in the ecosystem is to reduce software choice and push everyone into vertical software monocultures."
IBM is dictatorship. It's trying to dictate to people what to use and how to use that (it bans those who don't agree). In that sense, it is a lot like Microsoft. Don't be led by dictators. Show IBM the way out.
IBM not only ignores the needs of blind people. It also attacks people like Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU/Linux, because according to his own words, "since my teenage years, I felt as if there were a filmy curtain separating me from other people my age. I understood the words of their conversations, but I could not grasp why they said what they did. Much later I realized that I didn't understand the subtle cues that other people were responding to. Later in life, I discovered that some people had negative reactions to my behavior, which I did not even know about. Tending to be direct and honest with my thoughts, I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them -- especially women. This was not a choice: I didn't understand the problem enough to know which choices there were."
Put another way, IBM is a lot like the "original nazis". It doesn't tolerate people who are not "normal". Do you want IBM to be in charge of everything? I certainly don't. My distrust or lack of trust for IBM is a fairly new thing because I was mostly fond of it in the 90s and when it promoted OpenDocument Format (ODF) two decades ago. IBM has since then changed for the worse again. It's getting worse every year.
https://techrights.org/n/2025/07/06/Leadership_in_Free_Software.shtml
Ya.
Yeah, the Rust community is 100% populated by ultra-communist assholes who believe everyone else are nazis.