Tech Over Tea - The Man Who Boycotts Wayland | The Linux Cast

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Once again Matt from The Linux Cast is back on the show and of course he's here to talk about some of comments he's been making about the adoption of Wayland. =========Guest Links========== YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheLinuxCast Twitter: https://twitter.com/thelinuxcast Podcast: https://anchor.fm/thelinuxcast ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Is it working? Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome to episode 206 of Tech of a T. I'm as always your host, Brodie Robertson, and today we have a returning guest. I don't know how many times you've been on at this point. It's got to be at least three, I reckon. I think this is the third one. It's become an annual tradition.

Usually in January. I think all of them have been in January. December or January. Maybe they have been. Huh. Anyway, welcome back to the show. Matt from the Linux cast. How are you doing?

I'm excellent. It's going a lot better than it did last week. What happened last week? Do you have any idea? So, there was an, they, so we live in Michigan,

and we got a butt ton of snow and ice. Right. And, the minute we started the podcast, apparently the entire state of Michigan went down in terms of the ISP that I use.

Oh. And it was down for about 24 hours. It, it kind of waited a couple hours. No. So, yeah I use. Oh. And it was down for about 24 hours. It couldn't wait a couple hours. No. So, yeah. Okay. Sure.

I'm a winner. Well, I hope the snow's gone now. Well, the snow's still out there, but we haven't got any more, which is good. Okay. Okay.

So, probably not going to shut down everything again, unless you have this sudden storm that rolls in that no one knew about. Yeah. Random. It's Michigan winter. Yeah.

I look at Australia. We get fires sometimes. And those are pretty bad. I don't think we didn't have one last year, but at least one in my state last year, there were some like up North. So, you know, that was obviously bad,

but I didn't have to experience it myself this time. Last time there was a big fire, it was probably about 20 minutes away from where I lived. So that was good. That was real, that was real nice. I'd much rather have a foot of snow outside than fires. So yeah. Yeah, yeah. You can kind of like work around snow, real that was real nice i'd much rather have a foot of snow outside than fires so yeah yeah yeah you can kind of like work around snow you know snow plows and all that fires yeah when you got

like a forest fire like that going there's not much you can do about it like that's that's something you've got to just get away from and let the professionals deal with it brody there's honestly god there is no amount of money in the entire world that could get me to move to Australia. It's not the fires. It's not that you guys don't have cute, cuddly koala bears around there somewhere.

It's the media. It's the fucking spiders. Those people, there are people in my Discord who will troll me every once in a while. Cause they know I hate spiders with pictures of spiders from Australia. Like, no, no thanks. One of those fun comes in my house.

I'm leaving the house and never coming back. Like you'll never see my anywhere near the house again. No, I will live in Siberia before I, there. I'm sure it's a lovely place. Just, it's lovely for you. Yeah, you still, there's like a big, I don't know what it is. Something like dangerous looking spider. Just chilling in my housemate's car. Cause he's got like an old car that he didn't sold.

So it's been sitting there for like six months at this point. So the spiders have all like turned it into their home. There's probably, i don't know a good 20 or 30 under there you know it is what it is it's fine there was a spider that crawled across like the dinner table the other day i was like it's fine it's not gonna hurt you just a spider what's it gonna do do you bite you just bite it back that's australia for you look if it's a big one you hit it with a shoe but like actually the fun here's an experience that you would hate there was one time i killed a spider and it had like a egg sack on it so you

hit it and hundreds of little spiders went everywhere nope no literally i mean you could offer me a billion dollars and I'd be like no thanks that's fair you don't want money you know you can just call a you can get like your house like a like a pest parade and they like do things around

like the outside and make sure things don't come in but you know every so often you're still gonna have something that shows up and you know you just so often, you're still going to have something that shows up. And, you know, you just deal with it. It's fine. I mean, no. You'd be surprised how many people live in Australia

that actually are afraid of spiders. I don't know how they do it. I don't get it. My sister is absolutely terrified of spiders. But I think it's because when we were young young uh we're driving i don't know driving somewhere just like a long highway five hour six hour drive just dead straight road and there was like a big spider on the ceiling like of the the car just chilling there and no one realized it was there for however long it was there.

And yeah, that was, that was, that was fun when that happened. I'd be walking the rest of the way. Well, I'm not getting back in the car. If you want to see a spider in pain,

I have another one where, uh, we were on another long drive and I guess a spider climbed into the, the, the, like the wheel, like the wheel of the car and was just like hung on for deal, uh, dear life,

probably for a good 200 kilometers. It was just spinning over and over and over again. It had to have gotten there beforehand because there's no other way it could have gotten there. So that spider wasn't very happy. And I think it was very dead by the time we uh we stopped again oh that's a good spider anyway we didn't drag you on here to talk about spiders you're on here to talk about linux and more specifically xorg and wayland. To my surprise, you mentioned that you're actually trying out Wayland. You're actually trying out Hyperland.

Okay, so I have a FOMO moment going on because I see all these people messing around with Hyperland and... Me. I am the people. Yes, you keep making videos and teasing me with all this cool stuff, and it's very rude. Can't you make an X.Org video every once in a while, Brody? Go back to awesome when we all liked you, okay? I do have a video that I'm planning to do about choosing a window manager. I'm going to include both the X.Eleven and Weyland stuff.

But no, I'm pretty happy on Hyperland. There's one bug I have right now but we'll get into that a bit later go on with what you were saying okay so i just so seeing all your videos and like everybody in my discord uses hyperland or some kind of whaling compositor and i'm like you want so i've tried whaling in the past i've tried all the whaling compositor i've tried Wayland in the past. I've tried all the Wayland composites. I've tried GNOME and KDE Wayland, and I always had problems. So obviously, the weird thing is that Wayland's been around forever at this point. But when I started trying it first, like two years ago or so, it was basically unusable at that point because there wasn't very many applications that would work.

And X-Wayland was still basically in its infancy so that was what i complained about then and over that period of time my complaints have just kind of transformed with it as it's gotten better because it does move very fast right so obviously being a content creator my biggest issue has always been you know recording videos on wayland because screen capture is or at least was not good i mean you could get it to work 50 of the time and that was always a workaround it felt very hacky for a long time like you know something's hacky when the first step is put this environment variable into your.profile or your.bashrc or whatever. That's not a good experience for anybody, even a nerd. You don't want to have to do that to do something, especially when you know you're going to be moving back and forth between Xorg and Wayland.

You know, you don't want to have to deal with the environment variables to do that. So there was that period of time. And then eventually that got solved. But only very recently has it been a very seamless experience like within the last few months and when i say seamless experience i still mean kind of buggy but better right so i tried it again probably three months ago i tried i i tried to live on gnome for a while that was not a good experience and that has nothing by the way absolutely nothing to do with wayland i was

gonna say is that a gnome problem or is that a wayland problem gnome is so just not for me i always say gnome is so bad but gnome is not bad it's just absolutely 100 100 not for me but that's beside the point but it got me into actually using the wayland session of it because when you download gnome on open suza which is what i've been on for a while you only get the wayland session of gnome unless you use a specific version um now you can uh if you get if you install and that's only if you install after the install if you install it from yast you only get the wayland version um and you know so i was using that for a while and the the video thing started to work and i was like you want it's time for me to look at a compositor again and for the last three months my biggest downside for it has

been the fact that I could not get my monitors to go to sleep. So my computer's on all the time because it's a file server and it backs up all the computers in the house overnight. And so I need the monitors to go to sleep. I like it to be automatic. I don't have to have to find the button wherever the button's at. I don't even know where the button's at um so the monitors would turn off and turn right back on and that's been my problem for the last for for months now that's not just a hyperland problem that was a problem that i experienced on kde on on gnome on hyperland on river having done all of them um and sometimes on xorg so it wasn't even really a whaling problem so i don't even know what's going on there.

It wasn't until exactly today that I got it fixed. So it was literally like an hour ago where I found a workaround for it. So whether or not Wayland will be good for me this time, I don't know. I will say that the biggest reason why I keep coming back to Hyperland is because it's cool.

I mean, you look at it, it's pretty cool. Yeah. There's a reason why it's the... At least going by GitHub style, it's the most popular whaling composer right now. Yeah, if only there were more. Yeah. If only there were more. Yeah, I get it. I think that's my biggest issue right now,

is that I wish there was more choice. Because if you don't want to use Hyperland, Sway, kinda, but... does anybody actually still use Sway? Sway is popular, right, but the problem I have with the... the problem I have with core WLRoots compositors is I need to have window capture, and a lot of people like doing window capture with, you know, things like Discord and all that, and with the WLRoots portal, it, for like three years now, hasn't been able to do individual window capture. You can capture the entire screen, you can capture your entire desktop, but you can't capture individual windows, and that, I, that, that's one of the big

things that needs to be resolved, and I don't know what the issue blocking it is. I've not properly read through the entire discussion. I need to do that at some point. Maybe I'll do it later on. Besides that, though, I think Sway is about as good as I3. Obviously, keeping in mind the rough edges that exist right now with Weyland. But Hyperland I think is the most exciting. Having those animations, having the Hyperland plugin system, all of this stuff. And there's also just a lot of community excitement around

just doing things with Hyperland, making it look really cool. It's an easy place to get into if you just want to mess around. Then the head developer there is just so reactive to literally everything. You have a feature you want. Like someone mentioned, could you get the workspaces to work like Xmonad? Three days later, there's a patch in there for the next version to get it to work like Xmonad. What does Xmonad do differently? I've not used that one. Okay base is you've used qtile have you used qtile uh not extensively not enough to like have a good opinion so if you have multiple monitors and you have your set of nine workspaces basically what it is is that if you if you have workspace one here and workspace two there and you switch

from and workspace one is the active one and you want to go to workspace two It'll switch workspace to to the the focus monitor. Oh, it'll swap them Yeah, oh, that's really cool You can kind of get it hyperland to do that now, but you have to do some really wonky key binding stuff But the the dev has basically put it in for the next version whenever that comes out Now I won't get it right away because i'm on open suza but eventually um eventually i'll get that and that'll be awesome because that's really the only thing in terms of functionality wise that hyperland for me is missing because it doesn't do workspaces quite the way that i like it to be done um also we should talk about the bar situation because i hate i hate way bar with a passion dude okay

there are a couple other bars that exist, but Waybar's... Once again, this is going back to what you're saying where there's not that many options. Waybar is probably the most extensively developed option. So here's a confusing thing. If you look at... If you look at the Waybar version numbers, they did something really weird.

They, so version 0.9.5 was when they decided to implement a way to restart way bar out of the box with just like a command. Right. And the thing is, is that you see that 0.9.5 and you're like, okay, but then you look at the version you have, it's 0.9.24.

Like, oh man, I'm really far behind. No, yeah, I'm seeing it. 0.9.24 is the brand new one. 0.9.5 was like two years ago. The way they counted it was 0.9.9, and then they went to 0.9.10 and then 0.11.12. Sure, sure.

Also, it's doing incremental counting. It's not treating it like a lot of things do where they just... Yeah, yeah. They didn't put a version 0.10, which I guess... I mean, I understand. It was just very confusing because when you use a... Especially when you're looking at getting a package from,

in my case, I got it from the OpenBuild service, you look at the version numbers, like, man, that looks like it's really far behind because 0.24 is less than 0.5 in any metric that you count with. It was just very confusing. But my biggest issue is more of a me thing is that my CSS is very, very rusty. I haven't done any CSS in probably 15 years. And I'm not so sure I want to learn it again, because I have very poor memory from college learning CSS. And not only only that but it has changed

so much in those 15 years i don't know if any of my knowledge is transferable from back in college right and i'd be very worried like i'm going to ruin something many times while i'm trying to you know change this bar that's why i've just been trying, I've been trolling Unix porn to see if I can't find a bar that somebody else has done that I can just steal, basically. Yeah, my, I can, my CSS is very simple.

You see my videos, you see my bar. It's a black bar with some blue outlines and some grey when I, like, highlight something. That's pretty much it. I know that you can do some crazy, crazy things with Waybar. It's just not something that particularly interests me. Yeah, you're not much of a racer.

Well, I am. I just have a very simple setup that I do for every single thing. I don't like to... You have these people that have these split bars with rounded corners and borders around the edges. And then all this other crazy... That's just not my thing.

I've just never really been into that. I like my very minimal layout I have. And it works. And I never touch it. See? Okay, so I'm exactly the opposite i have a collection of probably 15 or 16 different color schemes i'll switch between them three or four times a day or at least i usually do i've actually been challenged by one of the guys in my discord to use the same color scheme for a year it's been torture like i know it sounds real every time i say that

like man you have really first world problems but see the thing is i work in front of my computer all day long in with my main job and the best way for me to keep things fresh is to change color skins from time to time because it makes things look a little bit different using the same layout and the same color scheme has been very hard for me because it just makes everything seem so boring. I read history. I basically read history papers for a living. That's what I do.

And some of the... I probably shouldn't say this, but some of the people who write for the company that I work for aren't particularly good writers. So spicing things up Linux-wise has been my way of coping with that and i haven't had that for a while so um my biggest worry right now as now that i got in the the monitor thing set up on wayland is the the bar situation and i will look into those other bars because i'm not particularly happy with waybar as it is right now. I think that...

The problem with X.org is that the writing is on the wall and has been forever. BSPWM, for example, is one of my favorite window managers. You used to use BSPWM forever. There's no chance in hell that BSPWM is ever going to Wayland. It's just never going to Wayland. It hasn't even had an X.org update in two years. Or three years, probably. BSPWM is ever going to Wayland. It's just never going to Wayland. It hasn't even had an XORG update in two years or three years probably now.

BSPWM is like a functionally complete project. And when that happened, yeah, it's... Have there been commits to it? There's a commit five months ago, but yeah, there's... That actually surprised me because there was quite a big long gap there between commits for quite a while. But I would bet money... So November... Sorry, i cut you off um november 2022 to march 25th there was a five month gap

then there was a couple of commits in april then they'll commit in august and there's been nothing since then but it's i only surprised surprised me that there's been that many. It's like seven. But you just know that there's never going to be a BSPWM version that's going to work on Weyland. It's never going to happen, probably. Xmonads say they're going to hire somebody to do Weyland for them. I wish them all the luck in the world. I would be surprised if we see that anytime very soon. That thing is going to take years to come if it ever does come.

Qtile is doing its thing. And it's functional, but also it's Qtile. And while it's my favorite window manager of all time, Qtile is fantastic. But it's written in Python. And Python changes a lot. Every time they change something in anything, it breaks. Like you're almost certainly going to discover if you use Qtile for any amount of time,

it's just going to break sometimes. And that's just something you live with if you use Qtile. At the moment right now, I'm in one of those breaking periods where I can't use Qtile on OpenSUSE. It just doesn't work. It crashes all the time. And the Wayland version is actually worse because it's still fairly new.

And then, I mean, can you just imagine the suckless guys saying, well, we're going to do Wayland? That's the funny thing. I actually could imagine them doing that. Like, I could imagine them, like, making the most minimal of minimal Wayland compositors. It has no, like, no features. You features, you gotta compile in every basic thing.

It is basically unusable. It wouldn't be based on WLRoots, that's for sure. Yeah, because WLRoots is not anywhere near suckless. Yeah. roots is not anywhere near suckless yeah like it's not it's not at all so it had to be something that they did from you know basically from scratch and i don't know it just feels something like it's more likely what they would do is just basically start over and call it something different um i mean and and the weird thing i mean dwl exists but none of the patches that dwm has work withL, which seems like a

missed opportunity. That's the problem I have with DWL. When it's called DWM for Waylon, yes, it is, and yes, there are new patches, but the thing that's great about DWM is that long list of patches they have

that have been developed over years and years. And I'm sure dwl can get to that and it is it's a lot better than it was early on but just i'll and like the core patches that people want are there for sure but if you just look at that full list on the dwm website there's there's a lot of things that are still missing. I have hope for it, though, because it does seem like a fairly popular option in that sort of space. And they seem to be fairly responsive to

people who say, well, I need this patch, can I get it? And a lot of times within a certain period of time, it does show up eventually. Someone will take that period on. And I understand if you go through the list of DWM patches, probably 80% of those rely 100% on Xorg tools. Like, you know, XdoTool or stuff like that to move windows around.

And almost all that stuff has interaction stuff that it would either absolutely necessitate, you know, heavy portal usage or just wouldn't be possible because of the way wayland is constructed right so i understand but can but in my mind i think well you know what this is supposed to be dwm it feels like a big missed opportunity to take this it would be basically like if somebody forked gnome but completely made every gnome extension inaccessible because you're basically taking all that work out and you're it's a missed opportunity but like i said i understand it and then you know there's things like river which is never going to be all that popular there's a couple other ones but it just feels like the traditional window managers that we've been using for the last few years either do have a Wayland plan, which is

just basically two or three of them, or they're just going to live on Xorg until they die. Yeah. And that writing on the wall is what is finally getting me to look at Wayland because I need a plan for when, you know, like X1 is not going to just stop working next week they're going to keep you know you know developing it but if they're really going to put a lot of their effort into the the wayland version eventually that development work is going to go there and not on the xorg version it's gonna it's it's a hard decision for someone like me who somehow i became the grumpy old man in the linux community i don't know how this happened. I'm not even 40 yet, but I don't like change. And it felt to me that they moved to Wayland too fast for people like me, for people who like change. I absolutely love the thing with the move to Wayland, but every time I've tried Hyperland or one of the Wayland things, I spend basically the entire time I'm switching to it, changing every little bit of my workflow.

I have to change different applications. At one point, I couldn't use the same terminals because Kitty wouldn't work because it wasn't ready. It would work now, but it wouldn't work then. Alacrity wouldn't work for a little while there at the beginning. So you had to find a new terminal, you had to find a new app launcher, all this stuff. It was basically switching from Windows to Linux

because you had to find everything new. And that really bugged me. And that's still somewhat the case, even though a lot more Xorg stuff will work on Wayland than before, which is making the process much smoother than it was even six months ago. I think when it comes to replacing apps, it also depends on what sort of apps you're using.

Because if you're a big GTK user or you're a big QT user, like if you have a GTK terminal, for example, there wasn't really ever an issue getting that working on Wayland because since GTK3 not sure which update maybe right at the start but GTK3 has for a very long time supported Wayland but if you're yeah I do get if you're using some like these weird terminals some of them did play weirdly early on with ex-Weyland I started, like, I never experienced those issues with Alacrity. ST, when I occasionally use that, that's always worked. I did have to replace D-Menu, sadly,

which is very sad, because I've had this D-Menu fork for a long, long time. I've patched it exactly the way I want it to be. I did find an application, or re-find an application that I used a while back called Toffee, which is like a super lightweight version. And it works great. The issue I have with Dmenu is sometimes it just didn't open on Wayland or it would just open behind windows or it would open in the middle of my screen. It just was really, really inconsistent. Toffee interacts with

like there's a protocol for app launches to specify where they want to be so that just works like it should but I do get what you mean about things being rough for a very very long time because whilst Weyland has been in development for 15 years

I've said it before but I think the first 12 or so years of development, a lot of that was focused on this, how would you say it, like, this perceived possible, it's like, um, what's the word, um, this, like like idealized goal of what a desktop could be and it wasn't until three years ago that we started getting a video capture being possible like george's safrax didn't do that work until 2020 you could not capture wayland with obs until 2020 like that's how new that feature is and a lot of other things are only very recently being dealt with. Like, multi-window stuff is being discussed now. Screen tearing is really, really new.

That was held back for so long, not just by GNOME guys, but Simon Sir, the WRoutes guy, wanted nothing to do with it for a really long time. And all of these other little things are now just coming together but we're very much in this transitionary stage so there is going to be a lot of a lot of rough edges especially with portals like portals you've experienced yourself a couple of months ago were kind of rough and even now are still a little rough around the edges like it it works probably nine out of ten times but then you have this like one time where you're like why why did this stop working what's going on and it's not just a portal thing but there's a lot of things where most of the time it works but then sometimes

it doesn't and that i do agree that some distros are moving a bit too quick i don't think you should be doing away with your x11 session right now fedora is going to do it because that's what fedora has always done they've always been like fedora is not a new user-friendly distro they've they're apple getting rid of the floppy disk yeah yeah or firewire or the headphone jack yeah yeah exactly that's exactly fedora would definitely do that yeah you guys don't need mouse support anymore we're moving on to whatever's next yeah so like fedora like they were the first distro that adopted system d they were one of the first distros that adopted like that offered wayland i think the first one was rebecca black os um but that's hilarious yeah um it refers to itself now as rb os it like rebranded to be like a

uh you know a more general distro but yes originally it was a meme i have no clue who rebecca black is it doesn't matter whatsoever it literally doesn't matter but yes originally it was a meme i have no clue who rebecca black is it doesn't matter it literally doesn't matter but it was it was basically a meme distro like hannah montana linux um i thought they were the same person i don't know who that is like it literally doesn't matter at all. But like, Distro is like, I don't, I can't speak for Sousa entirely, but they're not going to do away

with X11. Like you might have, I'm sure Xorg is still in the repost if you want to go and use that. Oh, there, when with, like I said,

if you download from the, install from the ISO, you get both. If you download from YAST, you have to download the extra package in order to get it. So basically what they've done is they used to be a combined package. Now they're separated out. And I just downloaded the Wayland one. I could have easily gotten Xorg, but I but I decided to be, you know, edgy and just, you know, use the Wayland version. And then found out that Gnome is still just, you know, Gnome.

And X.Org, even though X.Org, like... Even though we're like the KD version of Fedora and then the Gnome version of Fedora, KD is basically guaranteed Gnome's still in discussion about doing away with the x11 session xorg still gonna be in the repos because they do have these other flavors these other spins like budgie like xsce uh you know like uh i believe up into has a cinnamon version as well right now um yes i think it's the same kid who does all the spins

right right right yeah I think he's got like he's got at least like 6 different distros he runs he's gonna be forever 12 by the way he's gonna live that age forever I have I've got him on discord I need to bring him on the podcast

I need to ask him what his actual age is because I've seen so many articles like multiple years apart refer to him as the podcast um i need to ask him what his actual age is because i've seen so many articles like multiple years apart refer to him as the same age i don't know how old he is i'm assuming he's got to be at least like 17 now surely well you you would think so because because it was hilarious so when i first started my channel i made a video on ubuntu web when it first came i was like it had been out for days at that point so it was very very rough edges and i was an asshole in that video and then immediately afterwards i learned like you know something that kind of was like you know this kid's like 12 right like oh god like such a douche i haven't made a video on one of his on one of his spins again i was just too embarrassed about it.

No, I did a video on UnityX when that first came out. It was very buggy and people did the exact same thing with me. You're like, you know this guy's a kid, right? It's like, oh, okay. All right, then, sure. It feels way different, you know,

if you were to say something like this. We want, obviously, the younger generation to come into linux and then there's the old douchebags who make videos and criticize all their work so they go back to windows it's it's not a great situation yeah but you know it is what it is oh one thing you didn't mention um it was like 10 minutes ago at this point uh you mentioned some if with a dwm fork that breaks all the patches it's like someone forking gnome and then it breaks all the plugins you don't need a fork gnome for that you just need to update it gnome breaks all the plugins every update that's so true and they do they absolutely they say they don't do that on

purpose they they say oh we're all extensions. We even created this awesome extension manager. But first off, you absolutely do it on purpose because they all break every single update. But also, your extension manager was forked by someone else and actually made good. And you still refuse to put the good one inside of GNOME. Also, you don't ship it with GNOME at all. The distro is responsible for shipping the extension managers. You're not pro-extensions. In the perfect world, GNOME would absolutely

have no extensions whatsoever. You would use GNOME the way they want you to use GNOME, and that's fine. The thing is, every time I try GNOME or every time I talk about GNOME, there's always 10, 12 people that show up and say, I love the way the GNOME workflow works. It just makes 100% sense to me. And we're all very

special snowflakes. We all do things differently, you know, but I don't get the GNOME guys. That workflow just does not work for me. And I'm glad that it works for other people. But for me, if I'm going to use a desktop environment, it has to be, and I hate to say this, and i'm glad that it works for other people but for for me if i'm going to use a desktop environment it has to be and i hate to say this and i'm going to lose my linux card but it has to be windows like you know it has to it has also it has it has to feel like a linux thing where i can customize it if gnome is too much like a a lockdown piece of software for me and it just bugs me. Even though you can, you can, if you troll Unix porn as much as I do, you can see people do amazing things with GNOME and like, how did you do that? And how long is it going to last until they

do an update, you know? So GNOME is definitely not for me, but people really like, there's a reason why every distro chooses GNome and not kde i mean there's just absolutely a reason well it's a well curated experience and for a lot of people that experience is is really nice and i get it and a bit of the reason why they do ship gnome is uh traditionally packaging kde is just a nightmare. And then the release cycle of KDE is also terrible as well. Where it's like, you have the three major components that are all released at different times, at different cadences. So if you're a stable release like an Ubuntu, for example,

it's kind of a mess just to package the things you actually want to package. Whereas GNOME, it's like, okay, we release six months on the dot every single time and that's a lot easier for distros to just work with if you're someone like if you're just like arch for example you're just shipping things whenever or tumbleweed or something like that gen 2 it doesn't matter what the release cadence is but especially if we're talking like red hat for example they want a strict release cycle they can understand and yeah it just makes sense why it's so popular to actually be shipped plus it's just it's got the red hat support so it's well developed and it's a set number of packages

that hardly ever changes you know have a set number of packages. They're all wonderfully maintained, at least within the core GNOME stuff. Obviously, if you go through, there's a list of GNOME apps on their website. They have almost as many applications, their official GNOME apps, as KDE does. But the core stuff, what they they ship is a very small amount of of packages if you look at that in comparison to the kde dependencies it's absolutely crazy if you download just like one even if you're not going to have plasma on your machine and you download load a qt application it's like downloading a haskell application or anything written in python

you're going to end up with a ton of libraries, a ton of all this nonsense. And a lot of distros now, I don't know if you've noticed this, but they've been doing this weird thing where they package together. Like if you were to download Thunar, a lot of distros will actually package Cinnamon Desktop right with it. Like you have to download both unless you use the flag to ignore it that's a lot of distros that's on fedora and on ubuntu both do that okay it's really weird um no no not cinnamon excuse me i misspoke there xfc sure sure it's nemo that they do with the with the cinnamon they do both it's really really odd like you have to download but now you can choose to not do that there's a flag or whatever this is ignore hard dependencies or ignore soft dependencies i think was for like arch or whatever um you can do that and all of the

package managers have something similar to that but you you download their file manager you're also going to get the desktop environment usually that goes with it and there's several different distros i i don't know for sure if nautilus, if you did, for whatever full reason you decided you were going to use Nautilus as your, your file manager on a non-Ganome thing, you can do that. I'm not sure if they bring Ganome along with it, but it wouldn't surprise me. But it seems,

I don't know why they've begun to do that, but it's over the last year. I've just noticed that it's really, really weird. Yeah. I can't say I've experience of that but I do know what you mean about just pulling down a ton of dependencies I use Kdenlive obviously and I've probably got half the KDE libraries installed because of it

I can hear the the app image guy in the background if you just use an app image you could definitely you know get past that situation you know i have actually considered using the app image or the flat pack from time to time simply because you know i ran into you know especially traditionally caden live was very hit and miss between releases like some releases would be great others i don't think they ran their test suite and i had an issue a little while ago where i think it was actually a bug with mlt where it for some reason ignored one of the audio tracks yeah it ignored the second audio track and then duplicated the first into the second so there was just a regression that i guess nobody tested they released the new version and then duplicated the first into the second so there was just a regression that i

guess nobody tested they released the new version and then the problem was just gone but things like that like i i get i think app engine is really cool like i i genuinely do and my hope is that they do stick around and look as much I like flat packs I think flat packs are super cool and AppImages is neat they're like they they offer a very a very windows-like way of installing application you just grab a file and it's just the thing which I know a lot of people don't like you know I you know package manager and all them package Package managers are great, but I like the idea of these

different ways of doing application distribution. I don't think we just need to do package management, because that is what we've traditionally done on Linux. I think adding these different things that people can mess around with if they want to is probably a good thing.

I agree. Unless it's a snap. Okay, I just switched to snaps to make a video about it. Like, I just posted that video a few days ago. Oh, I didn't realize. Yeah, snaps have gotten better, kind of. But you can tell... Excuse me. kind of, but you can tell excuse me, you can tell

that Canonical has done a lot of work to make, because the biggest problem with snaps has always been they launch slow on cold boot, right? That's the problem. Obviously, you still have to deal with the loopback devices and all that, which bugs the crap out of me. It also bugs the crap out of me that they put a snap directory

in your home directory, and you can't move it unless you stop using snaps like it won't go away those things bother me but those are just pet peeves in mind the actual problem for snaps was always because it was slow it has gotten better but in traditional linux fashion they the fix that they came up with is not an obligatory fix so you have some snaps that are open lickety split like really really fast you have some that haven't instituted the fix that are really really slow still

is that the new compression algorithm they swapped to? yeah they switched to a different compression algorithm they've done a whole bunch of other magic stuff in the background so now if you download the Firefox snap well yeah it's still slower than if you were running a native package it's still you know you open it up in three or four seconds later it's it's it's open it's really you know it's not it's it's not so slow as like oh my god this is slow and then you open up something like

i have a to-do list to-do list application called to-do list that's packages a Snap as well. And it takes 50 to 70 seconds to launch. If I could go cook, get a coffee and come back and it not be launched yet, it's slow. And that's just because they haven't done it. For whatever reason, they did not make that a mandatory thing. If you don't use this compression algorithm, you don't get to be on the snap store that's what they should have done they didn't do it and the here's the thing is the i don't know this for sure this is just my head canon i what i believe to be the reason why they've done that is because they know if they did make it a requirement that they would lose a whole bunch of applications and therefore they would not have the library to compete with Flatpak such as this. Because Flatpak

already has a much larger selection of applications than Snap does. If they pushed a whole bunch of people out because they weren't updating their applications, they would lose even more. Again, I have no clue if that's true at all. Could be just making that up, but that's what it feels like to me.

The one advantage that snaps do have over flat packs is that list of proprietary applications they're not just proprietary applications that are on the store first party supported applications you have first party support from jet brains and from a bunch of other companies that just doesn't exist on the flat pack side yeah and the I say what you want about snaps but they do a ton of stuff way better than flat packs in terms of package naming updates I'm actually having just one package that you download and install I mean if you if you use Flatpaks and you download Kdenlive, you don't just get the Kdenlive Flatpaks,

you also get the Mesa Flatpak, you also get the, you know, a local pack, like a language pack. And all of a sudden you went from having one Flatpak to having four Flatpaks. And then it's not as if that's fine that they all can use the same language pack. A lot of times you download another Flatpak,

you're going to get another version of Mesa that it uses, and another version of a language pack that it uses. And I had like 12 Flatpaks at one time, and I didn't actually have that. I had 45 Flatpaks because of all these extra packages that went along with it. Snap doesn't do that. Now, they have some Deduplication. Well, that's actually... Before we get into that, that's not necessarily as bad as it might initially seem because Flatpak does a thing called deduplication, where if you do have the same data, it basically flattens it down

and just removes that from being a concern. So whilst you might have all of these Flatpaks, if you actually check how much data is actually being used, yes, it is certainly more than otherwise would be used but it might not be as much as initially seems yeah it was never the really the data that ever got to me it's like when you do flat pack lists in the terminal terminal nerd you manage everything in the terminal and you do flat pack lists and you have a list of all the flat packs that you have you don't know it doesn't tell you that this version of mesa goes with this flat pack you know and you you don't it makes it really hard to uninstall stuff and you have to use the

dash dash unused and it will do it basically do it for you so it's not that big of a deal but it's just it's kind of the same thing with the loopback devices on Snaps. It doesn't really hurt anything. It just bugs me. Sure. You know, it just bugs me. So, also, I don't know how we're this far into this whole package revolution thing and Flatpak still can't do a theme to save its life. I mean, just at all. It just, how have we not fixed this yet?

Like, we've been complaining about it for six years at this point and you still can't just inherit the default GTK theme out of the box? All sorts of flat packs I mean, the theory behind being able to manage all of your flat pack permissions in an application is really cool but it ceases to be

as cool when you realize that the developer can decide what to turn on upon compilation so basically it can give access to your home directory they don't have to ask you for that you just they have access to it if they think that they need it uh it's it's supposedly to give you this idea kind of like android where you install an application on android and it says, hey, this thing has access to this, this, and this. Would you like to have it continue to have access? That's the theory behind it, right? But they haven't gone as strict as that because the developers can basically give themselves access to whatever they want.

But for whatever reason, none of them give themselves access to the.theme folder to have access to the GTK theme whatever reason none of them give themselves access to the dot theme folder to have access to the gtk theme like none of them like how is this still i gotta remember that not everybody cares about theming like i do but i really i really i really would just it doesn't have to be i just do we had did we have to choose adwaita light i mean nobody uses adwaita Lite theme. Like, they all use the dark theme. Just choose that one and nobody would care. But stop theming my app.

I know, I know. Man, when that thing first came out, people were freaking the hell out. Yeah. No, I get what they were saying. It wasn't about users. It was about distros that were shipping broken-ass themes. Because that is definitely a thing and then

it's not the distro that ends up having people come to them, it's the application developers and they're like get rid of your stupid theme we can't do anything about fixing your broken theme I get it from their perspective but

as with a lot of things that i think come out of the gnome side of the world i think a lot of it is really badly communicated it's you like how would i say it's it's framed in a way where it makes sense to the people that already agree with them, but they do a bad job at convincing people why they should also care, if that makes sense. Well, and they... I mean, basically all developers do this, but they... Exactly like what you said, they make a decision based on what's good for them as a developer. And that's absolutely 100% the way they should do it.

But they also explain it as if everyone else is also a developer. Yeah. And should care exactly the reason. Like, when they pulled out the task tray icons from the bar. This has been ages ago. It freaked everyone out like oh my god How am I supposed to know if drop boxes running in the background? And obviously what they wanted to do was

That was during the period like everything used to be Nautilus like the entire shell used to run on on Nautilus And you know they were trying to decouple everything because Gnome was notoriously slow when it was like that So they were pulling stuff out left right and center and everybody was just losing their minds over everything that gnome i mean it's so bad it's now become a meme like oh gnome just removes features and they don't do that nearly as much as anymore they've started adding features again but it's still something that they have a reputation for and when they did that they didn't explain it as in like we're good lord we're trying to make this desktop environment actually functional because everybody's complaining that it's the slowest desktop environment

in the history of the world, and we need to fix that, and this is how we're choosing to do it. No, they were basically silent on the matter. Like, this is just the way we think it was supposed to be done, and if you don't like it, use KDE, you know? Yeah. I mean, that's basically, I mean, they obviously said it differently than that, but it's just, that's what it felt like.

And they do that constantly where their PR, whoever runs their PR is just not very good at running PR at all. Well, this is... Go on, go on. It's just Canonical has the same problem sometimes where they make a choice, like when they cut 32-bit libraries, right?

They did not they made that decision for development reasons but forgot to tell everybody the reasons why yeah this is one of the things i think kdo is really well there are people like nate graham who write these blog posts that explain what is actually going on in the kde world like here's why we're doing this. Here's what's going on. Here's the issues we're going to have along the way. And there's not really anyone in the GNOME space that does that.

At least to my knowledge. There might be somebody that does. And if somebody knows, please do let me know. But I don't know of anybody that writes blogs in the same fashion as Nate Graham you have like the Gnome Weekly blog which explains stuff in a fairly Gnome technical way and it's not really explaining stuff it's more about just taking quotes from individual developers

and mentioning like it's basically like a change log with extra steps but they do have that they do it the opposite way around is that they do the thing that's going to cause people to be upset with them and then afterwards they'll send their people out on mastodon and twitter to yell at people for criticizing them there's a couple people on mastodon yeah this is something i do definitely see there i people can work out the names themselves there is a couple

of people in the like in the gnome like that are sort of like seen as like the face of gnome that are really really bad at communicating like every single conversation they get into it very quickly devolves into you're a moron, you have no idea what you're talking about you're a terrible person and then it'll be like they won't even be replying to you anymore they'll just go and have their own separate tweets where they're insulting just the whole concept of them possibly

there's no possibility that I'm wrong there's no possibility that what I'm saying is confusing it's just the masses are stupid how how don't you get this basic concept it's not everyone there are people like cassidy like cassidy james is great at explaining stuff and there are people who do like you know different bits of dev work who are all great at explaining stuff but there's people who are seen as the face i think i think there are people who need to take a step away,

look at the way they're communicating, and think about why do people have this reputation that... Why do people think that Canome has this reputation of not caring what users want, of changing things, of being a really unfriendly community to get involved with? Because I think if they step away and look at the way they are acting, changing things, of being a really unfriendly community to get involved with. Because I think if they step away and look at the way they are acting, they'll realize very quickly why people have that rep- like, why you guys have that reputation. And I think all you need to do is just look at the way that people like Cassidy communicates,

and basically just emulate that. Think about why people have an opinion. Ask them, like, okay, can you explain why you think this is the case? Can you expand upon this? Or is the person just trying to troll for the sake of it? And have this, like, friendly discussion about what's actually going on. I get it. You get trolled a lot of the time and you get insulted, especially if there was some, like,

big feature just removed, like, you know, some stuff changed with system trades or something like that. I get it. You're going to get insulted a bunch, but insulting people back doesn't make people

any more sympathetic to your cause and is just going to make people hate you even more. Yeah, and... I mean mean all you have to do is make one youtube video about gnome that has anything negative to say and you hear from those people um and the thing is is that i don't think gnome has i don't think gnome is is as bad nowadays at listening to community as they have the reputation to be like they at like live at a way to is not theming support like we used to have but it's way

better than what we all thought we were going to get i mean when they said that they were going to pull when when gtk4 was first announced and we all learned that there was going to be absolutely no theming support whatsoever the hack was going away we thought well that's the end of the end of theming i'm gonna right that's what we all thought multiple videos were made many people were ranted and very very upset about it but they listened to that feedback enough to the point where they came up with a solution that not only i think is good but worked well for them from a development standpoint. You can do quite a lot from a theming perspective on, I'm going to make gradients exist. That's a genome application.

It's there, you can use it. And well, yeah, it's not like we used to be, but it's still, like I said, way better than, you know, which we expected to have. And while we, while it's absolutely true, what I said said earlier what we both said earlier about the the extensions things and always breaking they could very well just say no more extensions because that has to give them a ton of headaches every single version like how are we going to get this thing to you know work and yes we're going to break things and we're going to hear from every developer of an extension ever. They have to have a lot of development support behind

those even though they do break all the time. It would be much easier for them if they were like we all think that they are because of their reputation to just say, you know what, that's it. No more extensions. They could do that. It would obviously make everybody mad but they could do that it'd obviously make everybody mad

but they could do it but they don't do it so here's me i hate you know i'm defending you know what's wrong with me uh it's just they again i bring it back to canonical just a little bit canonical has somewhat of the same reputation as a very closed organization in some places and also making really poor decisions without explaining them well also just making some poor decisions even with good explanations so you know adding advertisements to the terminal commands like that's just that's just silly i mean no one's going to be like okay with that like oh i can see ubuntu Pro advertisements every time I do an app update. Great. That's exactly what I want from my terminal experience.

Or adding the Amazon links to everywhere for multiple years. And eventually they got it right, but it took them a very long time. Canonical has that same situation where they every once in a while you know they'll be going along really really well people thinking like ubuntu is really really stable i can recommend this thing and then they'll make some really weird decision that just pisses people off and all of a sudden again they you know they have they go back to the reputation of not knowing what they're doing or being closed off and not listening to the community, what they want to say. And, you know, it's just.

I think that this is a problem. When Microsoft makes a decision, you don't hear from the developers who may who do the work. Right. Sure. You hear from a PR department or you hear from the CEO or whatever. Right. In open source software, there's not really, I mean, yeah, you have CEOs in some of the bigger corporations, but you don't have huge, especially with this kind of stuff, you don't have huge

media PR departments. A lot of times the developers are the PR department and they're bad at it in a lot of situations. You know, they're just not, that's not, they're good at C plus plus or C or Python or rust. They're good at rust. You know, we know it's good. They're good at rust. Right. But then not necessarily, they're, they're probably not the most people person. So they don't have, they don't have the, you know, the have the necessary experience to deal with a horde of entitled users who demand that everything works exactly the way they think it's supposed to work.

And the thing is that I'm exactly 100% an entitled user. I am forefront wanting things to – just to bring it all the way around. This is my problem with Wayland. I want it to work the way that I want to work. Basically, what I want is X12. I want a perfect, you know, transition from what I was using to the thing that's new. And I would be happy, you know, Xmonad goes right along with it. Qtile goes right along with it qtel goes right along with

it i can use all of the stuff that i want to use exactly the way that i've always used it nothing has changed and that's the way on and then when i don't get it the way that i want it i make videos about it on youtube bitching about how you're never going to get x or away from you're gonna have to pry it out of my cold, dead fingers. I actually said that in a video, by the way. I think I actually used your face on that thumbnail. You did. It was my GitHub profile picture. Ancient picture.

Well, see, the thing is, if you Google Brody Robertson, I'm pretty sure that's literally the only picture that's in Google Photos of you. Surely not. I think there's some from your videos, but I think it's the only one that's not moving or doesn't have other things not. I think there's some from your videos, but I think it's like the only one that's like not moving or doesn't have other things on. I don't even remember.

I used that one for some reason. Maybe it was the first one. It's definitely the first one. Yeah, I'll give you that. It's probably the first one. But that's just me. That's the way that I've... It's one of those behaviors,

like you know that you have flaws as a person and you realize that they're flaws but you're still that way even though you know that those are flaws and that's my one of my flaws is that I know that I'm an entitled Linux user and that I come up with a lot of opinions that exhibit that flaw specifically, it's just been Wayland all the time. Like I want my machine to work the way that I want it to work. And if it doesn't work that way, obviously you're doing something wrong

because it was working just fine before. Why didn't you just fix XOR? Why do we have to keep creating new things all the time? What was wrong with Pulse Audio? We were perfectly fine with Pulse Audio. We finally got audio to work on Linux for the most part, even though Pulse Audio was still a piece of hot freaking garbage. But why did we

have to create something new? And also, is Pipeware supposed to be an audio stack for, you know, a replacement for Pulse Audio? Or does it have to do with video? Oh, it's both? Why is that confusing? I have very a lot of, I have a lot of issues with change. And when things change out from underneath me, I get like this. I get very ranty all of a sudden. And you should see it coming because it happens a lot. Because things change and it just bugs me when they change. And I'm the grumpy old man of the Linux community.

I don't know how I've gotten to this point. It's not great. You mentioned X12 in there and how, you know, it would be great if it's like it's a smooth transition uh i'm sure you've seen the xorg foundation page on x12 um yeah okay so for anyone who hasn't there's there is a theoretical design possibility of what they would want x12 to be and the fun thing you said there about it being like smooth transition that I don't think would be the case Traditionally at least with um there were versions of X before X 11 like the reason why it's 11

There were 10 versions prior to it. It's just they existed over the span of about two years so the development up to X 11 was very very quick and My understanding is X 9 apps didn't work on x10 which didn't work on x11 it's hard to find anything earlier than that because you're talking 1980s so there's not really any any of the any of the information that exists is paper logs yeah you'd have to go back to the library and get microfiche and stuff on it yeah yeah Yeah, yeah. I don't even know if the information's been digitized. Like, you've got to probably go to MIT's, like, MIT's archives or something to find anything.

But yeah, traditionally, there actually was still that issue of things not being compatible. But at least, you could at least say it wouldn't be as big of a diversion as we're seeing now. But you also mentioned Pipewire in there. So what is actually your thoughts on Pipewire? I have resigned myself to use Pipewire because you can't not at this point. I mean, okay, so theoretically, if you install Vanilla Arch and you use Arch install,

you get to choose between Pulse Audio and Pipewire. That's as far as I know, probably, actually, Gentoo's probably another distro where you could probably choose. Yeah, Gentoo, I don't think Gentoo even, like, it probably mentions an audio system in their install wiki, but I don't think there's any, like,

unless you pull in something, like, pull in a package that has a dependency on one of them, I don't think it would even install an audio system well no i'm pretty sure that it defaults to pipeware and then if you want to use pulse audio you have to use a use flag in order to get rid of that um maybe it's been a while since i've done a gen to install yeah uh but anyways i think those are like the only two distros that even give you probably the choice. Void, probably. Well, yeah, Void. I'm going to piss off all the Void people.

Nobody uses Void. Okay. Alright, DevJuan gives you a nice... Come on. Man, I'm going to piss everybody off. Everybody who's anti-SystemD is just going to be like, what are you doing? My distro counts too. Equal representation.

Anyways, the vast majority of real distros actually. Yep, yep, okay. We're going strong. They all use pipeware out of the box, right? Every single one of them. You can't name a mainstream distro. There's the PC version of it that doesn't use pipe wire out of the box. And I've come to the conclusion that if I'm going to use a Linux computer, I'm going to use pipe wire.

And it's gotten easier because it actually works now. I mean, I've got to find some wood again to knock on. But it has been a hot minute since pipeware has broken but there was a period of time like a year ago maybe two years ago now where literally every update what it broke pipe pipeware every time like there were like it didn't matter what they were like they could have literally changed one line of code and then the entire stack would have went down and it was always this like this there was a period there was one update this is the one that i remember but it was like every time for whatever reason it decided to count every input as an output so it read my microphone as a speaker and that's i mean this is the sure sm7b it does not

have any speaker capabilities it doesn't even have have a headphone jack. Wait for the microphone nerds to come in and be like, oh, but a microphone's actually a speaker? Oh, they're the same technology. Shut the fuck up. No one cares. Well, it's just... It was always weird things like that when Pipeware broke. Every single time,

it was like a fundamental thing that you expect has to work would break yep and every single time like it didn't matter like every update and it was at that point i was like you want to i'm gonna use debian because they're never going to get an update you know it's just never gonna happen you just use whatever they use you're gonna use it for the next two years you're never getting an. And if you're on a rolling release, oh, us poor souls. I mean, every single time, Pipeware, it was like

you know how Arch does this stupid thing where sometimes instead of sending out the stable version of a package, they'll send out the Git version instead? They do this in several, they did it with Grub for whatever reason for a long time. I don't know if they still do that or not where they where instead of pushing out the stable

version of grub they're always on the git the git branch um it feels like that with with it felt like that with pipeware where it looked it felt like they were pushing out the development version of pipeware all the time and it was like it wasn't just arch it was everybody, it wasn't just Arch, it was everybody. Like, anybody who got the new version of Pipewire, it's broke. Again, like, it was horrible. It was like, those are dark times. Dark, dark times. I know exactly what you're talking about. I had an issue.

So, you know, if you're, like, capturing, like, music, for example, in, like, OBS, or you're capturing, like, a game audio, something like that. So, you know how you can change the volume that you hear separate from the volume of like the game itself. So it stays consistent in OBS, but you hear something different. There was a period where my master volume is the volume that was being captured. So if I turn it up for me, it would turn it up for OBS. So I could not capture anything consistently.

It was an absolute nightmare. That's what made me swap back to Pulse Audio for a couple of months because I couldn't use it when it was like that. It was so bad that I saw people at that time was like, you know what, I'm just going to use ALSA. Okay, just hold on a second. We don't want to manage our audio via config file, okay? I'm sure the NixOS users would be very happy managing it via config file,

but the rest of us would like to go with it. Thank you. Yeah. I had to piss off the Nix users. I like mentioning NixOS because people have asked me to do a NixOS video for years probably, and i've never done it oh i have an ongoing feud with the next so it's not really a feud really just there's a whole bunch of nix users in my discord server and they're all awesome people like i'm doing a long-term review of nix right now i have it on

the computer that's behind me on my standing desk and a separate hard drive and on a laptop and it's it's a fine distro it does literally everything different than a traditional linux distro so i have this thing i posted a short of me and tyler on the podcast talking and i made this comment nix os is not a linux distro i did see that and now everybody in my distro in my Discord that uses Nix has changed their name to NixOS is not a distro, just to troll me. So I've been trolling them back. So every time I mention NixOS, I have to mention that it's not a Linux distro, even though it technically is a Linux distro. But it does... Have you spent any time with NixOS?

Have you spent any time with NixOS? My entire understanding is packages are installed through configs or something, and you can be very specific about the versions or dependencies you need, and they're separate from other dependencies. That's as much as I know. So, just as a broad overview, yes, everything's managed via config file, and it's cool that it's managed via config file.

They're very proud that it's managed via config file. You talk to an Nix user, they have to mention their Nix config somewhere in the conversation, but that's beside the point. The thing that's really weird about Nix is that they do everything differently. So if you want to find a path, like a traditional Linux path,

you could name five of them for me right now. Slash bin, slash user local bin, dot local, slash bin, all those things. None of those things on Nix actually exist. They're not there. There's not a slash user folder in the root directory of a Nix OS install. It just doesn't exist. Slash Etsy, not actually there. None of those things.

If you go to slash, there's nothing there other than your user directory. Not your user directory, your home directory. Those files do exist. They're just in the NixOS store directory, which is somewhere else. And that's where they all look. Now, I don't know the technical details behind how they've made this work or why they made this decision. But the reason why I'm always on that Linux that is not a traditional Linux, you know, distro is because of that type of thing.

Those files that you'd expect to be in the root directory just aren't there. Your paths are all different. And they're almost universally controlled by Nix itself. So any of the paths that you want. controlled by Nix itself. So any of the paths that you want, so if you want to put a script inside of the path, you would put it in an entirely different place than you would on a traditional Linux distro.

Or, this is where it gets even more complicated, you use something like Home Manager to manage those scripts, which is an entirely different can of words that I still don't understand to this day. Tyler's tried to explain to me, Home Manager, there's several people who've tried to explain it to me, I still don't understand to this day. Tyler's tried to explain to me, home manager, there's several people who've tried to explain it to me. I still don't really understand it. And then you have Flakes,

which are an entirely different thing. It's a very... It feels like whoever came up with Nix was like, you know what? I like Linux. Let's change everything about it except for the kernel and do it that way. And if that's the way that you want to do things,

okay, but in my few months of actually using it, it's by far, like, I would rather, I would say that Gen 2 is actually a more user-friendly distro than Nixis. And I know it sounds hilarious, but I think that it's actually true because yes, Gen 2 is by far harder to install than Nix's

because Nix, you can just use a Calamari's installer and it's fine. It's installed. Sure. But when it comes to actually maintaining the distro, I think that Gen 2 is actually more user-friendly. That's not to say that it's user-friendly at all it's just more user-friendly than the nick stuff is because

not only do they do everything differently but their documentation is so bad like it's it just here's another comparison i think that theuckless guys do documentation better than NixOS does. And, you know, the Suckless guys, they don't do documentation at all. So, that's not a competition that they'd even be playing with, and yet they do documentation better than the Nix guys do. And I'm sure there's plenty of fantastic developers

behind the Nix project. In fact, I know that there are, but their community needs to get on their like we all we all proclaim loud and proud that the arch wiki is the best thing about arch the nix wiki or whatever they call it is the worst thing about nixos it's really really bad um and because of all of these hot takes that i have because nixos has become the new thing right i i said this in the discord the other day that the linux community goes through fads just like any other

community um we see this in again this is my third mention of unix porn i feel like every time i come on your podcast i mention unix porn more than anybody else um but we went through the on unix porn a lot of time for a long time it was i3 was the window manager that everybody used then it was bspwm and then it was hyperland right now it seems to be hyperland you know we'll go through this over and over again we do the same thing with distros uh for the longest time it was arch i mean we all know the memes arch linux, by the way, I use it. You know? But that's gone away.

It's no longer cool to use Arch because it has an install script. Goodness gracious, it was fine when it was hard to install, but now if you have an install script... I hate people who complained about the install script because they don't actually know the history of Arch. It literally had an install script when it first started. They deleted the install script because they don't actually know the history of arch it literally had an install script when it first started they deleted the install script well because it wasn't cool with an install script brody you have to know this if in order to be cool well you have to you have to be edgy and and with it and the way you do that is by doing things the hard way.

But the thing now is NixOS. And several people in my Discord have mentioned that it feels like people have just used it because it started to become popular. I don't know if that's... It's hard to... It's like people started using Arch because it was popular. But Arch Linux is a good Linux distribution.

NixOS is also a good Linux distribution, so saying people just use it because it's popular feels wrong. I thought you were going to say NixOS isn't a good distribution. I would like to live and still have a YouTube channel, and I won't say that because they would literally come at me with pitchforks. But it feels wrong to say that, but it's absolutely true that a lot of people gravitated towards Nixos and Arch

because it was popular. And that it's a good distro is probably a bonus for those people because it wouldn't be popular if it was a bad distro. So I guess there's that way of looking at it. But for... wouldn't be popular if it was bad distro so i guess there's that way of looking at it but for for i so i was a distro hopper for a very long time you you only distro hop in april fools i don't know why that happens like every year he says it i'm gonna use i'm gonna stop using arch all of a sudden what was this last i'm gonna i'll tell you about my plan this year because i got a

fun one for this time. Oh, I hate April Fools, but I'm going to be glad to hear it. But anyways, you're not a distro hopper, at least not anymore. I don't know if you were previously there, but I've been a distro hopper since I started using Linux in 2017, but this last July, I decided I was going to stop distro hopping, and I've challenged

myself to use the same distro for two years. I chose OpenSUSE, a tumbleweed, and this is how it's going to relate to the next conversation because it was off the beaten path i didn't want to use a popular distro because i mean that would have not made it a challenge i wanted to use something that was you know not something that everybody used and tumbleweed has fit that thing and it's so good that i have a sticker i'm not going move the microphone just to ruin your audio, but I have a sticker on my microphone That says it opens to this so I become an open Sousa fanboy, but that was just kind of a after effect

I chose it because it was off the beaten path a lot of people ask me. Why didn't you choose Nix? Well first off I didn't know anything about Nix when I made the decision, but also Everybody and their brother uses Nix now and i didn't want to be just another i'm honestly surprised that there aren't more youtubers out there that use nix to be honest with you because a lot of the linux youtubers do tend to follow the the crowd because it gets a lot like fedora this for a while like a couple years ago when fedora was like the hot shit you know um and like the best way to get views on youtube was to follow that along and if i you know i made a fedora video like three times a week and each one of those things blew up you know and it didn't

matter but then eventually people got sick of hearing about fedora you know and i i swear like i knew that eventually nix was just going to become a thing that everybody was okay with, and you couldn't make content on it over and over again without, you know, just fatigue setting in. I've just been happy over here chillin' on Arch. I just, I'm just,

I'm just chillin'. If, look, if I need to try out Nyx stuff, I can, I can, like, maybe do it, but... It'll happen at some point. I'm not guaranteeing anything, but... I don't know. If I was going to try out Nick's, I would have to do it on a separate system.

I'm not going to do it on my main system. It's just not going to happen. Once you open up the door, you're going to... Well well i certainly wouldn't do it at the start on my main system maybe if i liked it i would change my mind i i it would be interesting to see your perspective on how they do things because it's just like i said it's completely different than anything else that you ever tried um unless you've used like something like geeks or something which is also a config based distro um but it's just completely different and their community is very

enthusiastic right and they they once you open the door that you're going to try this thing you're going to hear about it even after you've stopped trying about it which is fine like i'm very pro fanboy like if you become a fanboy or something um good i'm glad i love them i love open suza i like window managers i'm like i can't stand as much as i say i like x in Plasma, I don't want to use them. They're fine for other people. I'm a window manager guy. So I like it that people can find things that they love and enjoy

because it not only keeps them happy on Linux, but also allows when they're enthusiastic, they take part in the community, they get part in the community, they get involved in discords and Linux user groups, and they start contributing to documentation, and if they know how to

code, they'll start. It's all part of the thing. If you're enthusiastic about what you enjoy, you're more likely to participate in that thing, and I think that that makes open source what it is. So I make fun of the fanboys a lot of NixOS, but I'm also very happy that they are fanboys of NixOS

because without fanboys and fangirls, we wouldn't have people who are enthusiastic about literally anything. We'd just have a bunch of distro hoppers that would eventually end up on Ubuntu and that would just be the most boring thing ever. I say I'm fine with fanboys, but if you're a fanboy of Ubuntu and that would just be the most boring thing ever. If you, I say I'm fine with the, with fanboys, but if you're a fanboy of Ubuntu, we have problems.

Cause I don't, I don't, I don't get it. I don't, I don't get it. I don't know. By the way. Yes. I'm sorry. Um, I just thought about this cause we talked about window managers. Can we, can we just agree?

Maybe, maybe, maybe between you, me and DT, we can get together and have a Linux YouTuber community and just all of us agree that we can stop calling these things compositors and call them window managers. We had the name, okay? It's a window manager. It's what it is. We don't need to call it a compositor and say that it's new and shiny. It's a window manager. It's Hyperland window manager. It's great. It has a compositor attached to it. We don't need to name new things all the time. It was a perfectly fine name.

And it's not like it's so completely different that it needed a new name. It does the same things that all the window managers all did before. They just, those didn't have compositors attached to them. You know, and there's obviously a lot more technical stuff, you know, underneath it. But they do, from a user perspective it manages windows that's what it does let's call it a window manager wayland compositor just makes it more confusing and another thing that bothers me sorry no i get what you're saying uh when i when i stream and the hyperline devs just in my chat and i call it a window manager. He was like, oh, no, it's actually a compositor.

I'm like, I don't care. Shut up. Go back to my code. Excuse me, sir, but what you refer to as Linux is actually GNU slash Linux. And those are the same people, by the way. What you refer to as Wayland is actually Wayland slash compositor.

I need to rewrite the copy. That's a good plan. I I need to rewrite the copy. That's a good plan. I'm going to rewrite the copy faster. I like this. What you're actually referring to is actually WL roots plus whatever whatever whatever. Now that is an idea. I'm going to do

this. And you know there are those people who that's the way that they think and don't correct me because I'm forevermore, I'm just calling it a window manager because that's exactly what it is. And just like I will refuse to call GNOME GNOME, and I'll refuse to call Linux GNU slash Linux or GNU plus Linux or whatever the open source community has

decided they want us to call it these days it's just it's just linux guys i think most people have decided it's linux it's just a couple of weird people i mean i think it's once again this is this is the uh the old people that are older than you these are the people who don't like change from the 90s they're the people who remember that gnu herd actually still exists from the 90s. They're the people who remember that GNU Herd actually still exists, you know, and might actually decide that they're going to try to run it. By the way,

anybody who's actually using GNU Herd, if it actually is a thing that you can use, I would like to hear from you, because I want to know what that experience is actually like. They're working on 64-bit hardware support. I'm sure that there's someone out there like, oh yeah, I use GNU Herd, but

do you really? I mean, the fact that it's, first off, still around, and second of all, their website, you know, if you go to the GNU Herd website, it actually looks a lot like the Slackware website, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it.

They're both really, really old projects. They're both really really old projects they're both um developed by people who who are you know shall we say been around for uh for a bit so yeah it's uh i would love to hear from the because everyone there's somebody that i heard from recently that said well i'm gonna try going to hurt i never I don't think I've heard from that person again, so maybe they're still trying to get it to work. Maybe it's like NixOS and it just sucks you in and you just never want to leave it. Or Plan 9.

There was a little while there where people were like, oh, let's see if we can get Plan 9 up and running on our machine. First of all, let's not do that and say we did. Because that doesn't sound like a good time at all. Tyler, the guy who does the podcast with he um he did he had planned on his machine for a week um he's never gonna do that again he said he said so i'm happy i said i'm happy with arch i'm happy with this yeah arch is mainstream now you have literally a hardware device being sold

running a modified version of Arch. When they made that announcement, I was like, why did you choose Arch? Now, see, it would have been less surprising if they'd chosen, like, Manjaro, but, man, that would have pissed everybody off because nobody likes Manjaro. But it would have made sense.

off because nobody likes manjaro but it would have made you know like what it made sense but basically it makes a lot of sense because it gives them a lot of control over packages right it's like the reason why chrome os chose gen 2 right it gives them all the power that they want to control the packages that they choose they can choose which direction they want to go do they want to go more rolling release and bring something that's a little bit more They can choose which direction they want to go. Do they want to go more rolling release and bring something that's a little bit more up to date, or do they want to hold things back, which is really easy to do on Arch. So it makes a lot of sense, but the initial reaction that we all had when the

Steam Deck was, we're going to use Arch. Really? Arch breaks a lot. They break grub a lot. That's a thing that they do. Are you sure you want to use this but it hasn't been a problem and the steam deck has just it's an i'm not a gamer but it has made me into more of a gamer than i ever have been before and it's so weird first off these are all

things that you would think that i wouldn't like first off i'm not an arch guy anymore so there's one thing another thing is it's immutable. Not really into the whole mutable scene. And also, it uses Wayland. Wayland is what it uses to launch the game. With GameScoop, but it does have

the XOR desktop. It uses... You're right, but it has all these things that you wouldn't expect me to like. Sure, sure. And it is a gaming machine that, again, I'm not a gamer, but it's changed the way that I look at gaming. Because, you know, I knew gaming was getting pretty good on Linux over the course of the last couple years. But because I don't, there was a certain time where

i didn't know what the steam sale work actually was and now every time a steam sale comes up like oh i gotta go buy some games that i'm never gonna play but i'm gonna buy them like i have like 250 games in my library now yeah i know um yeah i have about 200 of them that i haven't played um but the thing is that's not that that right there is not a new situation so i have over on my shelf across the way all of my xbox games that i've ever purchased and there's like seven of them okay it's not a lot it's not it's not a big library half of them are still in the cellophane wrapper never played them and they're they're not they're not like i have Batman Arkham City up there. I have Mass Effect 3.

Both of them never, never opened. Never opened them. They're still in the wrapper. What? Why have you not taken the wrapper off? Well, first off, I don't know. I really don't know why I never played them.

It's just... No, I get not playing them but you buy the game and you're like i want to take the wrapper off of it all right so the biggest the thing is with console gaming and the thing is is the steam deck does this way better so it's one of the reasons why it's kind of converted me but on consoles i used to go months without using a console and if you ever go months without using a console you'll know that the first thing that makes you do is an update fair enough and it takes really playstation was way worse than xbox xbox does it did it as well i don't even i still have xbox hasn't been plugged in years um but playstation was really bad at this when i had a playstation you get it you if

you go a few weeks without playing it you you get on there like, oh, I'm ready for a gaming session. I'm going to pawn some noobs and, you know, Call of Duty. You know, whatever. I don't even know the lingo. That's how freaking old I am. But anyways, you know, you get on there and you're ready for a gaming session and you have to do

an update and it takes two hours to update because you haven't used it in forever. and apparently that's just how long it takes to update bsd i didn't even know this but that's just the way that it works apparently i don't know but you know and by the time it was done with update i didn't want to play anymore so the reason why a lot of that stuff hasn't been opened or played is because i kept going these long periods of time without using it and every time i got opened it up had an update and by the time it was done i was no longer interested in gaming the steam deck has updates all the damn time but it does this weird thing and it's apparently a new technology it updates in the background yeah yeah it's great

who would have thought that that would have been the thing to do? You know, it was like, duh. Surely there's someone at Microsoft and Sony that would have thought, you know, it's just updating the background. Well, this is the neat thing about doing an image-based system. They can update the image, and it doesn't actually apply that update to the next reboot. So you can just keep gaming, no problem at all. And then when you're done, up, turn it off.

It does the update when you're done. Boom. Done. Who cares? Do you think that the next generation of consoles will take advantage of that technology? I hope so. I don't know why they haven't. Maybe because there's not an immutable

BSD distro. Actually, I can understand Microsoft not doing it because the Xbox is basically just running Windows and Windows doesn't do this. Yeah, the anti-kernels, crustier and crusty. Yeah. I could see Sony working on something. I don't know.

They'll have to obviously build all their own tooling internally, but I could certainly see it happening. I would like it to happen. It would make things a lot more convenient, but you're still going to run into the issue where, well, if you're playing an online game, you're still going to have to do that update first. So you're not going to get away from that

because you've got to be on the latest update to play a game on the online servers. That's understandable. But it shouldn't be an issue with a single-player game. That's for sure. Well, I mean, even with the playstation 5 and the the most recent xboxes they're all like always on machines kind of like laptops is there something preventing them from just doing the updates while i'm not around like you actually can have the update there is a setting

you can enable i think by default it doesn't have it enabled but there's a setting that can be enabled at least on the PlayStation where it will download the updates when you're not using the machine. That would have made me much more happy. You gotta remember that when I was using consoles, they still had disks. And that's not really

how they do things anymore. I have a disk PS5, but I would not be surprised if the next gen doesn't have a disk.5, but I would not be surprised if the next gen doesn't have a disc or if the disc version is their second class citizen. Or you have to get like a $300 external optical drive. That has been discussed as well. Yeah. Of course, you could only use it with that console.

You can plug it into a proprietary connector or something that's definitely that's definitely something that's going to happen um still not going to be a console gamer though the steam deck is good it's it's just a good good device but i haven't you got the oled because you're mr um hot youtuber linux guy um how was did you try the original and were able to compare the two or did you just have the second one I have not tried the original now I've only used the second one and it is that one's great yeah it's great I don't know something tells me so someone doesn't use their steam deck

very much I use it I wouldn't I usually game on the weekend so i don't game that much um yeah like and that there are certain games i like to play on the steam deck um but i've also been playing a lot of path of exile recently and that's been taking up too much of my gaming time and i play you can play path of exile with the controller but I don't I play keyboard mouse so I've been playing on my desktop uh so the steam deck hasn't been turned on in a little bit um but I've also started playing monster hunter so I might play some monster hunter on the steam deck so what I'm constantly surprised at is the different levels of experience in gaming you have compared to the Steam Deck and regular Linux.

Sure. And it's a little worrying because it kind of gives this whole stratification of Linux is good at gaming now, but is it? But is it? I mean, it is if you know what you're doing and what packages to download and what version of Proton you need. And, you know, if you know how to change a version of Proton, if you're using it on desktop Linux, you kind of have to deal with that kind of stuff. And every once in a while, there's a workaround that you have to do. On the Steam Deck, they've come up with all this magic that just seems to make games play like it was a Windows machine. Like the example that I have most recently is Madden. Madden is one of those games that I used to play a lot on when I was a console gamer.

And EA has this pass that you can buy on Steam. It's like $25 a year, and you get access to all these games. Now, granted, 95% of them don't play well on regular Linux, but for whatever reason, they play fantastically well on the Steam Deck. Like, all of them don't play well on regular Linux but for whatever reason they play fantastically well on the Steam Deck like all of them like you can play the Sims on there which I mean if you're still into the Sims I suppose um you know you can some of the old SimCity games are on there again for nostalgia purposes that was kind of cool um Madden is on there Star Wars Battlefront games were on there a whole bunch of games worked fantastically well on the Steam Deck where they didn't work at all,

no matter what version of Proton I was using on the regular desktop that I use. And it's not even just the EA stuff. Like Forza Horizon 5. I bought that because I used to be a big guy in racing games. And I thought, you know, maybe I could get back into it a little bit. And it would not work on the computer in front of me worked fantastically well on the steam deck now it you could have cooked an egg on it because it got really freaking hot but it played really

well i mean i'm not a i'm not a frames per second guy so i don't really care as long as it's not stuttering i can play just fine right and Right. And that barrier where it works really well there and it doesn't work as well on regular Linux does worry me a little bit because if the Steam Deck were to draw in more people to use Linux, they wouldn't have the same experience in both places without some knowledge, at least least to get it to be similar you know I think in most cases desktop Linux it's gotten really good

something it's done really really good recently I have not run into a game in like a good while where I've actually had to go and do some additional things Nvidia yes there are some additional things sometimes. But at least in my experience, maybe I need to change a Proton version. And that's, you know, obviously that is kind of annoying to have to do. But that's about as much as I've had to do.

Yeah, like, I can't really comment on this because my experience has been basically perfect for a while now. I think that's just that I play some of the weird older games, and some of the older games aren't quite there. But some of the newer games... Forza's a newer game that didn't do well.

But the thing that surprised me blew my mind that Halo, the Halo Master Chief Collection works very well on every Linux that I've played it on. Like, even my crappy Intel integrated graphics laptop will play the Halo that's on Steam. Like, that's, I mean, yes, those are older games, but that's awesome. And it makes me happy Like I'm not much of a gamer, but I do Like it that I mean if it does feel like unless your game has

Hardcore anti-cheat the guys hate Linux type of thing Everything else just kind of works, unless you're having my experience where, like, for whatever reason, the EA stuff just... It's also possible that I did something wrong because, you know, that's my MO. But, you know, it's very reasonable just to say that that's my experience

because I have something weird or maybe Open suza doesn't handle it well or whatever so um but overall yeah gaming is just i would i would argue and i might make a video about this actually that steam and proton is the best thing that's ever happened to like ever like even if you're not even if you're not a gamer, you have to acknowledge that people being able to game on Linux, even if you don't want it to become the next Windows, being able to do that and do it well with games that actually matter is an important thing. But also, all of that technology that goes towards getting games to run goes towards making things like Wayland work better. You know, one of the reasons why so much effort has gone into X-Wayland is because they want to get the games to work, you know. thing that has kind of happened on Linux,

maybe we wouldn't have as much development work on that kind of thing, because there wouldn't be that urgency to get XOR applications that are never going to get transferred to Wayland to work on Wayland. So I think that

Valve's efforts on making gaming work on Linux, which I'm sure there were... That was not an altruistic thing that they did. Oh, no, they were terrified of the Windows Store. That's why they originally did it. Yeah, so the fact that they have put in this effort, and not only that, but they have embraced open source

unlike any other multi-billion dollar corporation really ever has you know like the open source the entire part basically everything to do with the steam deck is is a lot of stuff is very much open source that you can go download the the schematics and stuff is online and stuff um granted it's you know licensed in certain ways and whatever and there's rules but you know they they have they've embraced it and they've taken part in the community and they contribute to to things like clap what's it started with a c that's the one that kind of like behind wine what is the um it's not clabora. That's the office software. I know. I know who you're talking about.

CodeWeavers. CodeWeavers. I knew I started with a C. I should give credit for that. Partial credit. But anyways, you know, they work a lot with them. They work a lot with the Wine Project, all this stuff. And not only that, but they, you know, they support KDE.

You know, they give money to the Plasma, the organization and stuff like that. I don't know if they've given to Gnome or not, probably not. I mean, why would they? But, you know, they do all this stuff. And I think that that is important. And it all filters down, even if you're not a gamer, to making Linux such a much better experience today than it was even three or four years ago. And I think that that's fantastic and i'm very very excited for where all this i i know i've spent the last two hours bah humbing bah humbing bah bitching about every single thing that's changing in linux it's changing on from underneath me i've i've said I don't want to go to Wayland

because it's change, change, change. I hate change. But on the other hand, I am still very excited for where Linux is going. And I'm glad I'm going to be, hopefully be around to see it as it goes on because things have got... Linux was pretty good in 2017 when I started using it

it's way better now well I guess we can talk about what this is a part that a lot of people have a lot of opinions on but the fracturing

of Xorg into what we now consider these individual whaling compositors, whaling window managers, where they're their own, basically the entire display stack is each individual project. So, Hyperland is its own stack, Sway is its own stack,

Cosmic is given its own stack. Obviously, you still have these shared libraries, like WLroots is a shared library that HypeLand uses, Sway uses, so on and so forth. Things that use Smithy, things that use Mudder, like, I guess Mudder pretty much only uses, only Gnome uses it, but...

For the most part, each individual desktop has to implement their own display stack. You don't just have this XOR thing where you can just focus on the window management component, the extra things you want to do, the status bars, things like that. Now you have to do the entire thing.

And for big desktops like KD and Gnome, and I think this is a big part of the reason why we don't see more. For big desktops like KD and Gnome, doing this, obviously it took time, it took money, it took development effort. They got it done. And the smaller desktop environments like Budgie, they're getting close, Cinnamon, they have experimental

support, um, there's another one recently that had experimental support, but what do you think about this fracturing, because I know there actually is a, there was a GitHub,ub or gitlab issue a long long time ago i believe it's wayland 233 um wayland 233 which was basically let's make a xorg equivalent on wayland what do you think about the direction we're going and do you think this is for the best do you think there are some concerns here like what do you what are you going to say about it? Okay, so I think that this is the way Linux does things. It's the way it's always done things. Okay, so when they wanted to create a different init system and init setup,

there was multiple different ways of doing it, right? There was multiple different projects. When everybody decided that Xorg was old and crusty, which has been old and crusty for basically my entire life right um there was multiple projects in different directions that they were going there was mirror and there was you know wayland was it's doing its own thing and there was there was a couple other things and we didn't really know where things were going to go eventually wayland one we've done it with package formats and nothing's ever really won in package formats. And the fact that it's so fractured, we have 12,000 different package managers. Just on an offshoot, it feels like the package manager is kind of like that developer's first programming project that they have in university where it's like a to-do list

or calendar application. You get your teething done on a package manager. That's why there's so many of them, but that's beside the point. I think that that's just the way that Linux does things, and eventually something will come along like SysMD that will be more of a standard. Yes, there will be a whole bunch of smaller offshoots that do things a little bit differently, but eventually something will come along that will be more of a standard. Yes, there will be a whole bunch of smaller offshoots that do things a little bit differently, but eventually something will come along that will be more standard. And usually that's the thing that Red Hat backs. Whatever Red Hat, whatever way Red Hat does things, that'll be the way it ends up being. But the Weyland thing is weird, right? Because there's so many different

small components. We Wayland is actually kind of like SystemD, if you think about it. SystemD is not just one thing. It's many different things that go along, and it's all called SystemD. Sure. Right? Wayland is kind of the same thing. Yes, there's a thing called Wayland, but you're not just going to use just Wayland. You have to

use all these other things. You have to have xWayland. You have to have, you know, if you're going to use WLRoots and all the stuff that goes along with it if you're going to create a composite or whatever it's all all a combined thing that's going to happen and i i the problem i see with the way the way wayland does things or the wayland situation such it is is is that it's going to be really from a user perspective is that it's going to be really, from a user perspective, at least, it's going to be really hard for those of us who switch between things.

If you just use Gnome, you're going to be golden, right? Or if you just use Plasma, or even if you just use Hyperland, you're going to be fine. But if you rotate between window managers, you're going to be in a world of hurt because you're going to,

just from a portal perspective, none of them use the same portal. Well, the WBrokes ones do use the same portal except Hyperland. Right, well, it's not as if you're going to be switching between five or six of them. There's only like two of them

that you're going to switch between. But as of right now, there's only really two. Sure, they could implant their own portals. That's for sure. And they probably will because they're all going to want to do things slightly different. And it seems own portals, that's for sure. And they probably will, because they're all going to want to do things slightly different. And it seems like portals are the place

where a lot of that innovation and workarounds for using things like global shortcuts is actually going to happen. That's what portals are for, and that's where a lot of the things that you kind of have to do to get things to work kind of like Xorg has to go into that thing. And if you want to create your own compositor, you're probably going to be putting a lot of effort into a portal of some kind.

And if it's different and then people rotate between different compositors, excuse me, window managers, they're going to have a big problem because they're going to switch portals. And here's the thing is like one of my favorite things about OpenSUSE is going to be really, really niche. But with OpenSUSE, they'll let you have multiple portals installed at the same time. It does a really good job of managing those services so that it knows that if you're in, say, say hyperland you're going to need the portal for hyperland or if you're in xorg you're gonna you know need what that needs and if you're if you're in in kd plasma whatever it does a good job of switching back and forth like if you're on fedora though fedora will not let you have two of the same installed at the same time right it just won't let you do it it says would you if you're installing the hyperland portal and you have two of the same installed at the same time right it just won't let you do it it says would you if you're installing the hyperland portal and you have the kde portal installed

it'll force you to uninstall the kde portal before it'll run the install the hyperland that's just the way that it is and so so switching back and forth if you're a hopper you're gonna be probably in a little bit of trouble um but the thing is here's here's another problem from my perspective i'm one of those things where i'm very cognizant of uh this is a flaw of mine that i see everybody as a distro hopper or a window manager hopper but very few people people are much more like you brody than they're like me okay you stay on the same thing for ages and ages you're very happy with Arch I've I'm a distro hopper at heart so I like to hop around I'm also that way with window managers I have right at the at the moment let's just go through

this I have KDE installed I have Hyperland I have Openbox I have Qtile, BSPWM, DWM, River. I'm forgetting at least three or four of them. I have all these installed on the same machine, okay? And I use them, okay? I hop between them. I've used three different window managers today, okay? Now, granted, a lot of that was just because i was messing around with with with hyperland and because as you do you break things along the way so i had to go into something

that was working in order to do things and it was just easier to use a graphical environment than use the tty but that's beside the point i i do switch between these things because my add happens a lot and i like to switch between but i have to remember that not everybody is that way because i don't think anybody is that way uh except for me it's just the way that i do it but i think that when it comes to the fracturing thing is that for people like me if there are any others like that they're gonna have a hard time and i i also it make from not a developer but it feels like it's eventually going to cause some problems when it comes to development of the smaller projects because... Actually, it's already causing problems.

So Xmonad's trying to go to Wayland, but the developers who do Xmonad have no clue how to do it. They've blatantly said that they don't know how to do a Wayland version of Xmonad, so they're clue how to do it. They've blatantly said that they don't know how to do a Weyland version of Exmonad, so they're hiring somebody to do it. One of the reasons why they don't know how is because there are so many ways to do it. That has to be one of the reasons

why, because they could do they could choose WL Roots. They could choose one of the other options that exist. They could build their own roots. They could choose one of the other options that exist. They could build their own thing. And once they choose the thing that they're going to use, they also have to figure out how they're going to get the rest of their code based transition to that thing there. And that's not easy at all.

And if they could come across, I pick on the budget guys a lot because they like to change their mind a ton right you know they were going to go to qt for a while and then they're going to go to they scrapped that you're going to go back to gt4 and then they're going to do the ice thing now they're they've decided they're not going to do the ice thing now i don't even know what they're going to do now they change their minds a lot and i think that that the, like the X-Men, I guess have the tendency, not the tendency,

but the possibility of having a problem like that, because they could go down the road of doing WL roots or whatever. They choose WL roots and find out halfway through that. Oh my God, this thing just does not work the way that we want it to work. So we're going to have to start all over again and do the thing again. And because, because there are so many different changes,

there are so many different options out there for this. They could go from thing to thing and just eventually decided, no, none of this stuff actually works the way we want it. And then we had to start over, build it off from the stuff it's going. It's just a mess of Epic proportions waiting to happen, but it's only going to matter to win a manager, people,

because everybody else uses GNOME or Plasma. I mean, GNOME and KDE are going to do their things and it's going to work fine. KDE will be buggy. GNOME will be GNOME. And the people, the vast majority of people are going to use those two things. The vast majority of people are going to use those two things. And the fragmentation, such as we see it as, you know, nerds, isn't going to matter to 99% of the people. Even 99% of the developers aren't going to care all that much.

It's going to be, it's all that stuff has to do with the compositors themselves, the window managers. And as much as I would like to see everyone use a window manager because they're functionally superior to any desktop environment out there, I will fight anybody who says otherwise. And I will win that fight. I will take up that banner and I will win that fight. But unfortunately, not everybody does use a window manager and for the for the most part because everybody's going to use gnome or kde the fractional stuff the fragmented stuff that goes behind the scenes isn't going to matter all that much other than to a few developers but again i do think that eventually like wl roots seems to be like the the thing for the most part that people are going to center around

whether that's a good thing or not is another conversation because it has so many issues also i don't know if this is just my sense or not but it feels like the the main developers behind wl roots are it feels like they took some of the gnome juice in in some ways where they are very finicky about making certain changes that they don't agree with and if they don't do things in their way they just i think it's one of the reasons why there's forks of wl roots all over the place because it's really hard if you if you put make and i can remember not a developer but if you make a change to wl roots and then try to get it implemented into the project and either you do it the wrong way or they just really don't agree with what you're trying to add you have no chance it's kind of like the what's there's a like a vte vti technology or whatever that goes

into a lot of gnome terminals and stuff the developers behind that are very anti-chain. Yeah, that's it. And they, you know, for a while that's one of the reasons why, like, Termite, the terminal Termite, this is really super nerdy stuff, but they stopped developing the Termite terminal because

they couldn't interact with those developers anymore. You know, if WLRo roots feels like that sometimes some of the from some of the stories that i've heard i don't know if that's across the board or if it's just like off you know small instances or what you probably would know that better than i would but it just feels like we're we're going to center around wl roots in the compositor land for probably forever and that's going to be the thing and maybe or maybe not that would be a good or bad thing I don't I'm not exactly well acknowledged enough

to know it I did mention earlier that Simon Sir which is the guy that took over the W.O. Roots project after Drew DeVault left um it did take about two years to convince him that letting screen tearing happen, if people choose for it to happen, might actually be a good thing. So there are definitely instances where he will drag his feet for a really, really long time for something he disagrees with. Most of the time, Wroots is a lot more willing to play ball. Like, if KD has a thing they want to do, if Gnome has a thing they want to do, usually W Root is good to be like, okay, we'll just add

this as an option. And it's especially so over the past two or three years, as is often the case with a lot of things in the Weyland space. But traditionally, yes, that has been an issue in some circumstances. There are still issues where...

Obviously, there's still issues where there is some disagreement. So the big problem I have with Weyland is it is peak design by committee. So you have 20 different people, all with different requirements, all suggesting different ideas. And a lot of those ideas do not play well with each other so yeah things things collapse sometimes and you end up with a lot of forks when people have to go off and do the things that they wanted to do it that way so they're going to fork this thing and do it their way and they don't always you know compatible and you know that's just it's the way of things

especially it's going to be even more the way of things with compositors because there's not a gigantic corporation out there that's going to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the compositor space now wl roots has a lot of uh ties in with kde and gnome and stuff like that so they're going to be more influenced with the moneymakers of the world than Exmonad or DWM is ever going to be. But you still have a lot of people with fingers in that pie that don't necessarily always have that type of influence. And it's going to be very fascinating over the next few years

because, just to bring it all back, we talked there for a while how there's not a lot of choices when it comes to women managers in the Wayland space. And one of the reasons why I'm more hopeful now, even though that's still true, is because I do think that as Waylandland ramps up, and it's still even though, like I said, he's 15 years old, it doesn't feel like it should be ramping up. It feels like it should

be, like we should have a ton of window managers, right? Because it's been around forever, but it's really only usable now. Like, it took 15 years for you to actually be able to use it. And I think now that that's true, that people like me can actually use We Wayland for things,

as that becomes more and more true for more and more people, they're going to look at Hyperland like, oh, that's really cool. I know some Python. I know some Rust or whatever. I know NIM. I can go play around with that language, make myself a compositor. And as that goes on, as time goes on, we'll see the selection that we had with X.Org for the last 30 years. You know, like i3 has been around for 25 years or whatever it's been.

It's been around for a very long time. You know, XFC has been around for, I don't want to mention XFC. I mean, X-Moment has been around for a long time. DWM has been around for a long time. It's just going to, now that it's usable, as time goes on, the selection will get there, I think. But because it's so fragmented, unlike with X.Org, Windows Managers, where really, when you're making that choice, you're making your choice between two things. Do you want dynamic or manual? and which programming language or configuration language do you want to choose well there's going to be a third choice there when you're talking about

whalen what compositor is going to be underneath that thing and does it do the things that i wanted to do so and and then maybe even be a fourth thing does it use the portal that i'm going to need in order to do the things that i need to do? So it's going to be a more complicated choice because there's more things to do, more things to take into account when you're making that choice. It's not just manual or dynamic. It's not just, you know, does it have the configuration file syntax that I want it to have? It's going to be a couple extra things. And I think from a user perspective, that's going to take a little bit of time to become

apparent because right now there's only two really that you would choose from. And as that selection widens, those choices will become a little more difficult. But, and this is another thing, window managers are for nerds. We make choices. So I guess, I mean, we talk about the new user window manager. Come on. New users aren't using window managers. They're using GNOME.

They're using KDE Plasma. You know, if you're going to use a window manager, you got some nerd in you. And you're going to be able to figure out what a portal is. Do I need to make the choice between what portal I you'll be able to understand at least somewhat If something uses wl roots or something different and what that means for you and your gaming experience or whatever, you know So you're going to be able to make those choices much better than you know Random brand new Linux user ever would because they're not gonna make that choice They're not going to have to because they're not going to make that choice. They're not going to have to, because they're again,

going to be using, you know, they're going to be using plasma and those choices have been made for them. So that, that's where I'm at on all of it. Well, that's as good a note as any to end off the show. Just go on.

You're just getting to the two hour mark right now. So yeah, let people know where they can find you. Oh, I'm on obviously YouTube, YouTube, youtube.com slash linuxcast. Also, just to pimp it out just a little bit, I've mentioned a couple times, but I have a Discord server. It is awesome, but twice a month now, we're doing Linux user groups on my Discord server.

So those are in the events of my Discord as well, if you want to check those out. Basically, just a bunch of nerds open to everybody. We get around in one of the voice chats and just nerd out about Linux for a couple hours. And I do one at the beginning of the month in the morning and one at the end of the month towards the evening. That way I can catch the most time zones as possible. And the first one was spectacular. We talked about everything from AI to Wayland.

We talked a lot about Wayland because of course today we also talked about Nixos for a long time and I got into a lot of trouble because I said it was in the Linux distro. So yeah, anyways, that's where you can find me. YouTube and discord is where I hang out. Fair enough.

Um, anything else you want to mention? Nope. Other than tech over tea is an awesome podcast and you should you should subscribe to it it's a very good podcast brody has made it because he's had some look some of the some of the guests you've had on over the course of the last few months it's just i mean at one point you were just you know you had some guys on you had dt on at one point lately star after star and then you have some random linux youtuber on like me i'm one of these things is not like the other so um they'll be out by the time that this comes out but you don't you haven't seen them yet uh this is following

matthew command on that one just came out the other day that's the guy who made lutris then i had the primogen on um And then the week after that, I had Carl Rochelle on the System76 CEO. So you're following that. Well, now we come down in the world just a little bit. Just a little bit. I don't really... First off, the most hilarious part is that the Primogen reacted to one of my videos. That was the day. He was going to to one of my videos that was the day Mm-hmm. He was gonna do one of mine and then his audio died and he never went back and watched it Like when he knows who you are, that's when you know, you've arrived

Yeah, yeah, no I I Hear him talk about vim like I don't know what you say man. use Vim, but I don't use Vim like he uses Vim. No, it's an entirely different alien right there. He's really very talented at using Vim. Magic. Wizard. Absolutely. As for me, my Linux stuff is on YouTube at Brody Robertson. I do videos there six-ish days a week.

Check it out. I've got the gaming channel, Brody on Games. Right now, probably still playing through the world ends with you and Neptunia, so check that out. There's also clips there if you want to see shorts for some reason. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you are watching the video and you want to find the audio,

go to your favorite podcast platform, search Tech Over Tea, and you will find it yeah give it a final word what do you want to say Waylon sucks use Xorg very true see you guys later