Traffic was light and gas was cheap. It's the only part of that situation that I actually kind of miss.

You could hear the birds all the time. I don't care about cheap gas, but cars make cities noisy, ugly, polluted and dangerous. I only realised this in covid when almost all of the cars went and councils allocate more space for everything else for social distancing.

Eh. The people who actually like Google's horrible AI-generated garbage, were already using Google anyway. No change there.

Whereas, I have entirely *stopped* using Google's main site, and my usage of Wikipedia has increased, because I'm now using it (plus the browser's in-page search feature) for quick lookup of things that, six months ago, I could more quickly find on Google, but now I can't. Other things I find using ddg or startpage, and still others I now have to resort to older, pre-internet methods, like manually punching a bunch of individually-looked-up numbers into spreadsheets in order to calculate what I actually want to know, like it's 1992, because nobody who still indexes most of the internet, can figure out how to do decent relevancy ranking.

I do still use some of Google's other sites, e.g., Google Maps. Though who knows how long that will continue to be useful, given the direction the company is heading.

And as I wrote elsewhere, X11 is arguably one the most far sighted display projects ever created in the history of computing, period.

I quite agree. There were an amazing number of things they had right in 1987 which held up incredibly well during a period of absolutely colossal change in how computers work. It's proven to be remarkably resilient and adaptable.

What's particularly good is the decoupling of various things. Sure these days there's a lot less call for the line drawing primitives, but it's not like that actually matters. It's positively kilobytes of code that was debugged three decades ago.

Funny thing over it's 38 years of existence it's had a large number of very angry detractors, but it's always been for different reasons that keep shifting. Meanwhile it just keeps on working.

That we're throwing it out because most of the maintainers didn't understand it is absurd.

And being thrown out because the code is a mess... well who's fault is that?! And if they made a mess first time why won't they make a mess again? Wayland still, in 2025, has no way for programs to request a placement position for their windows. The wayland devs have tied themselves in knots to justify why this is hard, or why users shouldn't want it, or why programs that use it are "legacy", "old fashioned" or any one of a number of pejoratives meaning broadly "working, keeps working, and no one fucks with it to make it stop working". Meanwhile X had it since 1987, probably before, and it's supported on Windows and OSX and probably a few more obscure systems.

You know funny thing is I've never installed Debian. I switched to mint, which is pretty straightforward to install, but I usually then customize things a bit. I've no problem with trickier installs, they're not hard, I've run RedHat 5.2 back in the day, Arch, even OpenBSD on a Zaurus (that was an adventure!), but I've never had a go at Debian.

I've not tried Mint desktop, my personal preference is a weirdass FVWM setup that no one but me likes, but I find XFCE quite reasonable with good defaults and customization, so I'll use that if I'm not taking the time to fully set up a machine for long term use and/or it's going to be shared. I've not tried mint desktop, I suspect it's fine.

The problem for us is probably going to be the various "big" self-contained projects like LibreOffice or even Java, and the risks they'll drop X11 support too.

That's probably what'll do me in in the end. Probably via GNOME dropping support for GTK on X. Though of course the big projects lag a long way behind, because who the heck wants GUI toollkit churn?

I cannot believe that SystemD, which was actually needed as Sys V Init was awful, is the one attracting the controversy, despite it slotting into any existing distribution and requiring no additional support, but Wayland gets boosted, and not just boosted, but boosted usually by Slashdot's old farts. Maybe there's a way to persuade Poettering to lead the Wayland project, as I suspect 99% of it is a personality conflict thing.

Yeah they have sanded most of the rough edges off systemd. It was a bit broken at the beginning to put it mildly. And it was very politicised with GNOME breaking support for sysv init almost forcing distros to adopt systemd for a while. It was a mess, and very intrusive, but it didn't take all that long, a few years to actually fix the bad bugs and now it does what we did before, plus a bit more, but at some point I forgot to care anymore. Wayland is 17 years old and which is to say it's nearly as old as X was when X was all old and busted and Wayland was to replace it.

It's also bonkes the "X teh old" mantra, given Linux isn't much younger now. But if you tried to presuade those people to use a kernel written in Rust I wonder what their response would be!

The thing that annoys me about snaps is that the security setting are a combination of excessively restrictive to the point of making work impossible and so permissive they are useless. Particularly, they are limited pretty much to reading ~. That's where all the really sensitive information is stored, my private keys and all that jazz. But "for security" I can't get them to read the big old disk I have mounted elsewhere. This is completely useless.

I've had various other problems with file paths. On 25.04, I couldn't (from BASH) do:

cd to/some/directory
inkscape file.svg

which is a pretty fundamental thing in unix. This does not work with the inkscape snap. So I uninstalled and got a proper version.

Basic stuff breaks with snaps, unless perhaps you are using nothing but the most 100% standard machine entirely from the GUI. And that's ignoring the fact that they are glacially slow in startup compared to normal programs. Maybe that's fine if you use a Mac or Windows style workflow where you open a large program and do a lot of stuff then maybe switch to another, but I'm using Linux in a distinctly unixy way.

And after trying for days to be OK with their GNOME, I gave up in disgust and installed XFCE.

By the time you have to put in the effort to remove all the ubuntuishness from ubuntu, as you why bother?

No, that's no how it works. The OG font system (which you were never obliged to use and few things do now) has font descriptors (XLFD) which look like this:

-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1

See the two 75's in there? those indicate that that specific pixel font was designed for a 75dpi display and would be 12.00 points tall. The point is X11, the original version makes ZERO assumptions about the dpi of the display: those numbers can be arbitrary. Just because it came with a lot of fonts with 75 in doesn't mean X was designed for 75. In fact you can change things just fine. X will attempt to find the file that best matches the XLFD and then fix any discrepancies by scaling the font.

Your car probably came with normal tyres and if you live in a snowy climate, you may well fit snow tyres in the winter. It would be nonsense to say your car was designed for normal tyres and you fixed a design limitation of your car by installing winter ones. It makes as much sense to say 75dpi was a design limitation of X.

I don't even know if X11R1 came with 100dpi fonts or not. R3 was the earliest I could find with a few minutes of googling, and this information may be lost as X was largely proprietary back then. The only reason we even raise this as a point is because X from R1 had a general purpose mechanism that supported 100dpi and indeed any resolution of fonts so the only way to know is not to look at the manual but to see if it actually shipped with those fonts.

Every machine in my house runs Linux, my machines at work all run Linux. I don't have problems like that, not for years. Under Wayland there is buggy shit that doesn't work because of bugs and also stuff that doesn't work because Wayland is still missing functionality in 2025 that have been ubiquitous in windowing systems since the 80s.

Oh crikey I just read that. Gives me the heebie jeebies. Even assuming his code is sound, he'll have a hard job making this into anything other than a solo project with his outlook.

Right you don't have any good answers.

Who cares if it has some old bitmap fonts? You don't need to use them, and it doesn't mandate that you do use them either. Supporting 75 DPI doesn't mean it's "designed for" that.

Funny thing is you're also wrong about the toolkits. The ancient ones are surprisingly good at actually respecting the DPI settings, and allowing you to configure larger fonts. Not that it's relevant because the old toolkits aren't part of the protocol anyway.

As for extensions, why is X the only system people complain about when it gets new API calls. You know Wayland gets new things in the protocol, just like X, and also literally every other system.

In what way was X11 designed for "low resolution displays"?

I found snaps to be not very good, and ultimately decided to part ways with Ubuntu because of them.

I also don't like gnome. I gave it another solid try on a 25.04 machine I was using (not my choice), and it varies between ok, strange, and awful. I really tried but it has some vexing UI decisions.

And also it took about half an hour before I hit my first Wayland related problem.

They're is no alternative to bureaucracy for doing useful work at scale. There's is not one example ever where large scale works are achieved without it.

Yeah, I think slashdot could have benefited from a longer form forum section.

What do you mean "designed an aircraft"? What sort of level of granularity are we talking about?

It's a tool.

Yeah but so is my prime minister[*]. Are you saying that means he's not intelli... oh never mind I think I just answered my own question there.