Definitely count these other DEs into my criticism. They’re part of the problem.

I love the free software ideals, but I think we’ve got a different understanding about what constitutes a good and a bad license. What many people seem to forget about software licenses is that there are these other countries besides America. They couldn’t care less about whatever judges rule over there. A good license is a dumb simple license that anyone can enforce in court with ease. A bad license is a convoluted license that crumbles like a house of cards in court. I read the GPL. It’s convoluted. It’s an opaque terms of service agreement riddled with legal boilerplate disguised as software license. A poor execution of the ideals I hold. I only use the GPL as a formality to say that I support the free software ideals, but I have zero confidence in enforcing the GPL.

Shame that we don’t have a proper copyleft license tho? GPL, as nice as the intentions are, is a license so convoluted that I’m not sure whether it’d hold up in court in my country.

None of the above. 64-bit, 64 bit, x86-64, 1000000 bit, amd or i772.

Let’s use Ubuntu for comparison.

• Ubuntu is more up-to-date than its spin-offs.
• Ubuntu will outlive Ubuntu spin-offs, including Zorin.
• Ubuntu offers paid support, whereas Zorin doesn’t.
• Ubuntu community is bigger than Zorin. More resources, tutorials, etc.

Zorin adds only the following value:

• More themes, primarily lookalikes, which is arguably a bad thing.

When people see Windows, they expect Windows. Installers, package managers, peripherals like printers, etc. are different from Windows. Pretending to be Windows makes people feel at ease for a moment at the expense of fundamentally misunderstanding what operating system their computer runs on, and it’ll trip them up eventually, probably sooner rather than later.

See macOS: It looks and feels different. People don’t mistake macOS for Windows. People who use Windows don’t expect macOS to behave like Windows, and vice-versa. But hey, let’s make macOS look and feel like Windows at first glance. Why can’t I run that .exe? What do you mean, I must use an app store? What is HDCP, and why does it prevent me from connecting this laptop to the projector?

For iOS that’d be questions like: Where is the Play Store? Why can’t I install that (Android-only) app? I think you get my point.

This is one of the reasons why branding exists. Yet many Linux distros would like to believe they can replicate the Windows experience through a miracle, and fool themselves into thinking that’s a good thing for Linux newcomers. It’s especially bad for people who don’t know they use Linux, like when they use computers at the office, library, etc. with a distro like Zorin.

I get the frustration here, but it’s also kind of… idk? A “No, you just don’t understand!” response. Everyone who works in a white-collar job knows what it’s like. Everyone has different theories about why that project failed, but nobody knows the objective truth. Nobody can present a “documented and verified” list of reasons for why the project failed, not even the lead designer here. They can guess, but never reach the truth. He could repeat what he always did without changing anything in the next project, and succeed due to different circumstances, plain good luck.

We’re talking about Word documents, right? People hate when a line wraps in the information block, or their fold and hole marks move, each time anyone with LibreOffice touches their letters. Or their crop, bleed, registration, fold marks, color bars, and safety margins when they print anything professionally. Sorry people, but Word documents require precision sometimes. They look the same, even across several major Word versions. If LibreOffice can’t guarantee that, then you can’t use LibreOffice in an MS Office environment where precision is necessary, and this starts with letters.

I didn’t describe what could happen, but what did happen in real life. Multiple times.

MCBans is open-source btw, yet nobody checked and changed the source code, as should be expected really. Operators whitelisted alts and friends. Blacklisted server owners who didn’t appreciate that the operators of their global ban list griefed their servers with backdoors.

Another typical example is 3rd-party Discord ban lists. They whitelist their own staff. They backdoor their bots to fuck around with servers. It’s just the reality of global ban lists.

If Erlite doesn’t abuse that trust, then someone with admin access will, or Erlite’s successor. That’s a fact, not an opinion. Email spam filters prevent single trust lists with scores, multiple lists, etc.

There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.

A global ban system without a more nuanced approach is a terrible idea. Operators of that global ban system will whitelist themselves, blacklist people they hate, and maybe even backdoor the mod that enables them to ban people in the first place. Server admins have no choice but to either opt into the entire system or have none at all, and both of these options suck. We’ve seen how this plays out already.

Score players by your own criteria, weight everything with different blacklists, greylists and whitelists, etc. and ban players if they exceed a threshold automatically. It won’t be perfect, but email catches most spam emails that way just fine.

I’m not sure what you mean. Artists use Photoshop for drawing, yet Adobe advertises Photoshop mostly for image editing. Even though Adobe advertises Photoshop for image editing, which should include fully editing your own photographs imo, the only proper Denoise AI is built into Lightroom lol. Photopea also supports pressure sensitivity, so it should work just fine for drawing. Tools aren’t that big of a deal. People who design beautiful presentation decks use PowerPoint after all… with the default system fonts.

Lists of things not to do:

• (NEW!) Go through airport security with an encrypted laptop, sensitive information and free conference stickers showing your affiliations as an activist. Let airport security confiscate your laptop. Airport security drugs and wrenches you. You give them your laptop password. The police arrests you based on suspicions of terrorism.

I like your thinking, comrade

If you still want to give Wayland a try, take a look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland#Electron. Electron still defaults to X11, even though Electron supports Wayland. It’s a bit annoying to set the command line parameters for apps that bundle Electron, but maybe it works for you.

Oh yeah?

That must explain why Xorg always crashes and burns when I don’t use the correct combination of desktop environment, compositor and driver version.

Let’s not ignore that Xorg doesn’t and never has been working for everyone. At least default to the sane option with a future.

New users will drop any distro whose default desktop doesn’t work perfectly and with all the features they want. Linux already has a high enough bar competing with Windows, creating additional artificial hurdles is dumb in the extreme.

Both Wayland and X11 are an artificial hurdle to someone, so at least pick the sane choice with a future.

Security vs convenience has always been a give and take. There’s a cutoff point that users will not cross if the software becomes too inconvenient to use, even if it means greater security. The Wayland stack is currently on the bad side of that line and needs to step over if it wants to see mass adoption.

No, Wayland is doing fine.

Nobody cares, all they see is the stack, with Wayland leading the point on the bad decisions.

Oh no, Wayland isn’t X11. It’s almost as if Wayland isn’t supposed to be 1:1 bug compatible with Xorg.

You are projecting. If this were any other piece of software, say, a text editor that works and does everything you need, and someone came and told you “you must use this new one, it’s the way forward, but oh it doesn’t have all the features you need from a text editor” you would say “thanks but I’ll wait until it’s ready”. But you see no problem in pushing Wayland on people who can’t use it?

I don’t know about what text editors you use, but my text editor doesn’t allow malware to log all keystrokes, tamper with windows of other apps, steal clipboard contents without consent, inject keystrokes into other windows, escalate privileges, and install rootkits that persist OS re-installs using the escalated privileges.

People work on Wayland. Nobody works on Xorg. Alternatives don’t exist.

Please understand that nobody will ever successfuly push through incomplete software. Not on Linux. There’s nothing you or anybody can do to convince people that incomplete software is complete and usable when it’s not.

Do you need a refresher about systemd, pulseaudio, etc.? I’m not in the systemd haters camp, but pulseaudio broke regularly for me. Yet every distro included pulseaudio.

Nobody’s pushing “against Wayland”. I don’t give a shit about Wayland or Xorg. What I care about is having a full-featured, easy to use desktop stack readily available.

Install Xorg yourself. Don’t make it easily accessible to new Linux users. Software vendors will take note and postpone doing any work for as long as possible.

And you obviously care a lot about Wayland and Xorg.

The “dead” Xorg works perfectly with everything. That’s the bar.

No, it doesn’t. And if it does, then it’s still insecure by design. When I hear statements like these, I get the urge to publish PoC Linux malware code on GitHub that uses X11 specific features to show just how not fine it is.

The Wayland choice of pushing complexity onto individual software projects by making them all reinvent a hundred wheels, and onto users by making them hunt down a hundred pieces of software to build a wobbly desktop stack sucks.

Substitute Wayland for X11 here. Both Wayland and X11 are protocols. X11 is such a lackluster protocol that all implementations died, except that Xorg still has users.

Read again

If that’s the case, then stick to Xorg for now. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s in your best interest for distros to ship with Wayland out of the box.

Do you want software you use to be compatible with Wayland now or later? If your answer is later, then you have to wait for vendors to catch up, even though Wayland got auto type (already exists) and screen magnification by then. This is why I never understood this push against Wayland. People, your only alternative to Wayland is dead and unmaintained. If you push against Wayland as the default option, you only make your transition in the future more painful than it needs to be.

Also, I think it’s still a software vendor problem. If your software can’t work with the only desktop protocol with a future, then you must contribute to the protocol to create a way to make it work. If you don’t do that, then shit happens, your software breaks, and you had 10 years to contribute to the protocol to fix it. Your risk management was once again exceptional at avoiding doing the necessary work to eliminate a long known risk.

Force people to move to Wayland. Everyone that complains about Wayland breaking their setup knows how to install Xorg anyways. But most Wayland problems are software vendors not giving a shit. Make them give a shit by breaking their shit by default on most setups. 10 years was enough time to make your software work on Wayland. If your software doesn’t work on Wayland by now, then your risk management is shit.

Thank you.

I hate that most Linux brightness controls assume that humans perceive brightness linearly for some reason. I don’t want a flash bang in dark surroundings when I forget to use the slider. I don’t want to press my brightness up key a thousand times or resort to the slider in bright surroundings.

So yes, please merge this.