Wayland has it’s fair share of problems that haven’t been solved yet, but most of those points are nonsense.
If that person lived a little over a hundred years ago and wrote a rant about cars vs horses instead, it’d go something like this:
Think twice before abandoning Horses. Cars break everything!
Cars break if you stuff hay in the fuel tank!
Cars are incompatible with horse shoes!
You can’t shove your dick in a car’s mouth!
The rant you’re linking makes about as much sense.
In case of Gnome it was addressed, just by different people. Gnome 2 continues to live on as MATE, so anyone who doesn’t like Gnome 3 can use it instead.
To provide features that Xorg can’t.
If you don’t need features like fractional scaling, VRR, touchscreen gestures, etc. you won’t notice a difference.
People who do use those, will. Because for them, those features would be missing or not complete on Xorg.
You’re linking a post… From 2010. AMD replaced radeon with their open source drivers (AMDgpu) in 2015. That’s what pretty much any AMD GPU that came out in the last 10 years uses now.
Furthermore, the AMDgpu drivers are in-tree drivers, and AMD actively collaborate with the kernel maintainers and developers of other graphics related projects.
As for Nvidia: their kernel modules are better than nothing, but they don’t contain a whole lot in terms of actual implementation. If before we had a solid black box, now, with those modules, we know that this black box has around 900 holes and what comes in and out of those.
Furthermore, if you look at the page you’ve linked, you’ll see that “the GitHub repository will function mostly as a snapshot of each driver release”. While the possibility of contributing is mentioned… Well, it’s Nvidia. It took them several years to finally give up trying to force EGLStreams and implement GBM, which was already adopted as the de-facto standard by literally everybody else.
The modules are not useless. Nvidia tend to not publish any documentation whatsoever, so it’s probably better than nothing and probably of some use for the nouveau driver developers… But it’s not like Nvidea came out and offered to work on nouveau to make up to par and comparable to their proprietary drivers.
k, so for the least used hardware, linux works fine.
Yeah, basically. Which raises a question: how companies with much smaller market share can justify providing support, but Nvidia, a company that dominates the GPU market, can’t?
The popular distros are what counts.
Debian supports several DEs with only Gnome defaulting to Wayland. Everything else uses X11 by default.
Some other popular distros that ship with Gnome or KDE still default to X11 too. Pop!_OS, for example. Zorin. SteamOS too, technically. EndeavorOS and Manjaro are similar to Debian, since they support several DEs.
Either way, none of those are Wayland exclusive and changing to X11 takes exactly 2 clicks on the login screen. Which isn’t necessary for anyone using AMD or Intel, and wouldn’t be necessary for Nvidia users, if Nvidia actually bothered to support their hardware properly. But I digress.
Worked well enough for me to run into the dozen of other issues that Linux has
Oh, it’s no way perfect. Never claimed it is.
I like most people want a usable environment. Linux doesn’t provide that out of the box.
This both depends on the disto you use and on what you consider a “usable environment”.
If you extensively use Office 365, OneDrive, need ActiveDirectory, have portable storage encrypted with BitLocker, etc. then, sure, you won’t have a good experience with any distro out there. Or even if you don’t, but you grab a geek oriented distro (e.g. Arch or Gentoo) or a barebones one (e.g. Debian) you, again, won’t have the best experience.
A lot of people, however, don’t really do a whole lot on their devices. The most widely used OS in the world, at this point in time, is Android, of all things.
If all you need to do is use the web and, maybe, edit some documents or pictures now and then, Linux is perfectly capable of that.
Real life example: I’ve switched my parents onto Linux. They’re very much not computer savvy and Gnome with it’s minimalistic mobile device-like UI and very visual app-store-like program manager is significantly easier for them to grasp. The number of issues they ask me to deal with has dropped by… A lot. Actually, every single issue this year was the printer failing to connect to the Wifi, so, I don’t suppose that counts as a technical issue with the computer, does it?
wacom tablets
I use Gnome (Wayland) with an AMD GPU. My tablet is plug and play… Unlike on Windows. Go figure.
Both Intel and AMD GPUs work fine on Linux. Both work fine with Wayland.
Wayland has been around for over a decade and has been in a usable state for the last 3 or so years.
Attributing the fact that Nvidia stuff still barely works to the fact that some distros have made Wayland the default is just stupid wrong.
Besides, Nvidia experience isn’t/wasn’t the smoothest even on Xorg. Linux desktop is simply not a priority for Nvidia.
To be honest, most things in Nobra can be installed/done to regular Fedora. And, unlike Nobra, Fedora has more than 1 maintainer: goof for the bus factor.
Almost everything that’s not Gnome can be considered lightweight, to be honest.
“Our goal is knowledge, so we’re going to obfuscate everything to fuck and make things unreadable”
OpenSUSE + KDE is a really solid choice, I’d say.
The most important Linux advice I have is this: Linux isn’t Windows. Don’t expect things to works the same.
Don’t try too hard to re-configure things that don’t match the way things are on Windows. If there isn’t an easy way to get a certain behavior, there’s probably a reason for it.
I have a 120 gig SSD. The system takes up around 60 gigs + BTRFS snapshots and its overhead. A have around 15 gigs of wiggle room, on average. Trying to squeeze some /home stuff in there doesn’t really seem that reasonable, to be honest.
As long as you don’t re-format the partition. Not all installers are created equal, so it might be more complicated to re-install the OS without wiping the partition entirely. Or it might be just fine. I don’t really install linux often enough to know that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You can put your /home on a different BTRFS subvolume and exclude it from being snapshotted.
Not OP, but I have the same setup.
I have BTRFS on /, which lives on an SSD and ext4 on an HDD, which is /home. BTRFS can do snapshots, which is very useful in case an update (or my own stupidity) bricks the systems. Meanwhile, /home is filled with junk like cache files, games, etc. which doesn’t really make sense to snapshot, but that’s, actually, secondary. Spinning rust is slow and BTRFS makes it even worse (at least on my hardware) which, in itself, is enough to avoid using it.
It’s a little more than that.
SteamOS also uses an immutable filesystem and the system updates as a whole. Because of that, there is no risk of something updating separately and breaking compatibility.
It’s fairly common for things to update on regular linux distros and break e.g. anticheat support in Proton or some other thing.
Another thing SteamOS does, at least on the Steam Desk, is actually using two partitions. The updates are always installed to the inactive one, so there’s always one image that’s known to work. Even if an update fails, the device will simply boot into the intact OS image. Regular distros usually don’t have much in terms of fail-safes, so if things break, they have to be fixed manually.
Basically, SteamOS is trying to be as reliable and “hands-off” of an OS as possible to provide best console-like experience.
SteamOS is an OS for gaming consoles. It’s specifically tailored for gaming and it has controller-friendly UI.
You can game on regular distros, but you need to install and open Steam, download games, and, then, launch them, before you can grab the controller.
Even looking at power delivery alone, there’s still different voltages and wattage, as well as cable specs. Nothing really changes. You still end up having different cables for different devices, essentially.
USB-C is an interface that can be used for a variety of different things. There are different “levels” of power delivery, there’s thunderbolt, there’s DisplayPort-over-USB-C, etc. And for things to work, the devices on both ends of the cable and the cable itself must comply with any given standard.
For example, on some laptops you can’t use a USB-C port with thunderbolt for charging the device, nor the port that supports power delivery to connect thunderbolt devices. While using the same physical interface, the ports are not interchangeable. Even if you’re connecting everything right, nothing is going to work if the cable you’re using isn’t specced properly (and trying to figure out the spec of a cable you have, considering they rarely have any labeling, is, definitely, fun).
If anything, USB-C makes everything harder and more convoluted, because instead of using different ports and plugs for different standards, it’s now one port for nigh everything under the sun. If you want things to work, nowadays, you have to hunt down cable and port specs to ensure everything is mutually compatible.
USB-C makes things kinda worse, in a way.
In the past you could slap together an adapter by chopping up some old cable and slapping it to a new power supply. And things would work, even if voltage or power ratings didn’t match exactly, or even at all (although, things would usually work much worse then).
I’ve jury rigged an adapter for my laptop, which uses a 65w, 20v power brick, to run off a 45w, 16v one, when mine died and I needed to access the files. It worked, as long as I wasn’t using doing anything too computationally intensive on the thing.
If the laptops used USB-C, that is very likely would not have worked at all. Chances are, the manufacturer of the smaller laptop would’ve bundled the cheapest power brick that covers the needs of the machine, so it would’ve most likely been 45w, 15v over power delivery. And mine would’ve been 65w, 20v over power delivery. And since everything in USB-C world has to talk to each other and agree beforehand, chances are, nothing would even try to work, even if it, realistically, can.
Dualbooting is possible and easy: just gotta shrink the Windows partition and install Linux next to it. Make sure to not format the whole thing by mistake, though. A lot of Linux installers want to format the disk by default, so you have to pick manual mode and make sure to shrink (not delete and re-create!) the windows partition.
As for its usefulness, however… Switching the OS is incredibly annoying. Every time you want to do that you have to shut down the system completely and boot it back up. That means you have to stop everything you’re doing, save all the progress, and then try to get back to speed 2 minutes later. After a while the constant rebooting gets really old.
Furthermore, Linux a completely different system that shares only some surface level things with Windows. Switching to it basically means re-learning how to use a computer almost from scratch, which is, also, incredibly frustrating.
The two things combined very quickly turn into a temptation to just keep using the more familiar system. (Been there, done that.)
I think I’ll have to agree with people who propose Virtual Machines as a solution.
Running Linux in a VM on Windows would let you play around with it, tinker a little and see what software is and isn’t available on it. From there you’ll be able to decide if you’re even willing to dedicate more time and effort to learning it.
If you decide to continue, you can dual boot Windows and Linux. But not to be able to switch between the two, but to be able to back out of the experiment.
Instead, the roles of the OSes could be reversed: a second copy of Windows could be install in a VM, which, in turn, would run on Linux.
That way, you’d still have a way to run some more picky Windows software (that is, software that refuses to work in Wine) without actually booting into Windows.
This approach would maximize exposure to Linux, while still allowing to back out of the experiment at any moment.