If you are a registered entity (even non-profit), you can be fined millions of dollars.

It is a very dumb law.

They need to do what Midnight BSD did, exclude California residents from the license.

You do not need to understand anything about X11 vs Wayland. Use whatever your distro of choice defaults to.

Wayland is the future. Every Linux desktop user not fighting hard to avoid it will be using Wayland in 2 years. The majority are already.

Wayland and X11 are both protocols. They are a way for graphical applications to talk to a “display server” (your graphical desktop).

X11 was invented in the 80’s. Until recently, there was essentially only one surviving implementation on Linux—something called Xorg. While Xorg was the display server, you had to add something called a “window manager” to control what your desktop would look like and how windows would behave.

While Wayland essentially does the same thing as X11, it was built to quite a different set of design criteria. If you have not been part of the history, it is not worth knowing about. Security is one of the big improvements.

Perhaps the only detail worth mentioning is that the display server and window manager functions have been combined in Wayland into something called a “compositor”. So while everybody was using Xorg back in the X11 days, there are many competing compositor implementations in Wayland. They differ not just in how they manage windows but also in how them implement many other details like how to take screenshots, manage multiple monitors, or handle scaling. There are a set of standards that define this behaviour. It is a bit like the web where you have different web browsers and web servers but the same web applications work on all of turn (which perhaps some small differences).

The two systems both “do the same thing” and are quite different at the same time. If you use one, switching to the other may seem painful as things that worked may not anymore and even things that still work may be done differently or require quite different knowledge. Not many people switch from Wayland to X11 but anybody that used Linux 5 years ago has had to switch from X11 to Wayland (or feel pressured to). Not all of them are happy about it. Some of them rely on workflows that Wayland does not yet or many never support. These people consider the switch to Wayland a really big deal which is why you hear about it so much.

But, if you already use Wayland, ignore it. Everybody will stop talking about it soon as almost everybody has switched. The majority that have not switched are using popular desktops like Cinnamon or XFCE that have also not switched. They have not switched as they want to make the transition very seem-less for their users. Which also means you do not have to think about it. One day they will move you and hopefully you will not notice. Or, even better, it will seem like a bunch of new features in a new release.

That amount of money is one developer full time maybe. Which can make a really, really big difference for an Open Source project actually.

I hope they do not take their foot too far off the gas before completing their Wayland transition.

Once KDE, GNOME, COSMIC, Budgie, and Cinnamon are all Wayland, 90% of all Linux desktops will be Wayland. With XFCE, it could be 95%.

I am looking forward to essentially all Linux desktop users being on Wayland so we can stop acting like it is not already the norm or even pretending that it is not going to happen. I am looking forward to putting it behind us and we are so close.

At the same time, I have a lot of respect for conservative desktops like Cinnamon and XFCE that, while acknowledging that Wayland is the future, are taking great pains to minimize disruption for their current users and even to allow users to keep X11 as a fully supported platform. I am all for that.

I do not expect Cinnamon to maintain X11 as an option very long after they switch to Wayland as the default. First while many distros ship Cinnamon, it is really a product of the Mint project and Mint is very much a Linux Desktop. Second, Mint does not have the resources as they point out in this article. Of course, I could be wrong.

XFCE will probably keep X11 around much longer. First, XFCE is very popular in non-Linux settings. But mostly I say this because xfwm4 itself takes very little dev effort and it is the only XFCE component really tied to x11. Xorg is essentially in features freeze. As long as XLibre does not break everything, xfwm4 will just continue to work. The other components of XFCE work fine in both environments already. The goal of xfwl4 (the XFCE Wayland compositor) is to mirror the xfwm4 experience. And xfwl4 is deferring to other components to define behaviour (eg. xfsession and xfdesktop). So, it should be easy to keep the overall XFCE experience in sync on both display servers without much wasted effort.

I have well over a dozen Linux machines running in my home. More than half of them would be considered garbage by most people. Clearly, I disagree.

I have never had a problem with LMDE. My mother has been using it for about a year now. I used to have to come solve Windows problems for her a couple times a year but she had never asked me for any help with LMDE.

Cinnamon is not a “fork” of GNOME. MATE is a fork of GNOME as MATE started from GNOME source code.

Cinnamon was a reaction to GNOME 3. But Cinnamon was written from scratch to reflect a more traditional desktop metaphor. It was not created from existing GNOME code.

In the days of GTK 3, Cinnamon shipped quite a few of the default GNOME apps. Later, when GTK4/ libadwaita appeared, Cinnamon stayed with GTK3 and formed the XApps project which did fork many GNOME apps to stay on GTK3. XApps was meant to be a cross-desktop project serving all the GTK desktop environments.

These days, Cinnamon is trying to fork libadwaita to make GTK4 apps look better on their desktop.

In general, Cinnamon is fairly conservative. They are the last major desktop environment to default to X11 for example (though you will disagree with that view if you count XFCE as one of the major DEs).

So, if I wrote an AI preface to somebody else’s book, they lose their copyright?

Seems very unlikely. Can you cite any case law for this?

Promise free cloud forever. Randomly delete it without recourse once people come to depend on it.

Check: sounds pretty evil.

I am a big SQL fan but not all data has to be relational.

Let’s say I want the GPS coordinates of ten million vehicles every 5 seconds. I have a vehicle id, a timestamp, and coordinates. I do not care if a few writes get lost. Why does this have to be relational?

And perhaps I also record other info that may change from vehicle to vehicle. Perhaps just values that are true if present. DoorOpen, BrakeApplied, LightsOn, LightBarOn, EngineOn, etc. I may only be displaying this data in a UI. I may get different values from every vehicle or even every write. There is no “schema”. I mean, I can have a JSON field or something in my relational table? But this is not exactly relational anymore.

It is because it only “gets out of your way” if you like its choices. If you have different preferences, the strong opinions very much get in your way.

There is a reason GNOME extensions are so popular. And those extensions break all the time.

First, Teams works well on Linux. I have been a desktop Linux user since the 90’s and I use Teams every day (week days at least).

Second, that does not mean they use Teams as their preferred collaboration software.

Even on Windows, you use what the meeting organizer used to schedule the meeting. And if you interact with external companies, you are going to be joining Teams meetings regardless of your preferences.

And, if you had to make a reference you thought everybody would get, Teams or Zoom seem like your best bet.

So making reference to something someone one would say in Teams is not exactly Ronald McDonald admitting he eats at Wendy’s.

If Teams IS their preferred solution, I think the bigger deal may be a European company relying on a US cloud provider, even more than proprietary vs FOSS. At least, that is my view.

I would love a great Open Source video conferencing option to emerge and become popular though. As above, this kind of software has network effects and I would rather get invited to Open Source meetings if possible.

I cannot wait until GNU HURD is ready and the GNU/Linux crowd migrates to it.

The rest of us can then replace Glibc with musl, GNU utils with UUtils, GCC with Clang and we will not have to listen to this GNU/Linux crap anymore.

I mean, all the GNU stuff is great and I use them all the time. But it is ridiculous in 2026 that people want to brand the entire OS with the makers of 3% of the packages (all of which have world-class alternatives). Especially since almost all of those packages are majority authored by Red Hat.

GNU is great and massively important historically. But the end of the GNU/Linux nonsense cannot come fast enough.

Devuan objects to some of the engineering choices in Debian, like systemd.

The authors of this project are clearly not systemd fans.

What did you replace Xorg with 10 years ago?

I am not the biggest Richard Stallman fan, and this was also my first thought. But in the interest of truth, it is very unfair to portray him this way.

What Stallman argued for was correctness. He is guilty of pedantry, not pedophilia. Did he do it badly. Yes. Was it a socially risky position to take? For sure. Is he a child predator? Not based on any evidence I have seen.

There are actual child predators out there. Let’s focus on them.

X11 desktops work fine and will continue to work fine. But very few people will be using them in 5 years.

Why don’t you just stick to X if you think it is better?

Of course, the rest of us have moved on to Wayland because we disagree with you.

No need to fight though. Have fun.

It is a different ecosystem. It requires time to mature and yes, you have to migrate to it in order to use it.

Moving to Wayland was a bit like moving to a different operating system from an application point of view. The toolkits made that reasonably easy for most apps but they really do not help much if you are the window manager.

So yes, compositors had to be built. This was easy enough for the big projects like GNOME and KDE but a bigger ask for smaller players. But there are lots now: GNOME, Plasma, Hyprland, MangoWC, Niri, COSMIC, Budgie, LxQT, LabWC, Wayfire, Sway, DWL, River, Wayland Maker, etc. I am sure there are many more I don’t know or forgot. There will be lots more.

And yes, a Wayland compositor is a bit like the X server and window manager combined. So, they are harder to build. Except libraries have appeared to do that. There are wlroots, Smithay, aquamarine, Louvre, and SWC. There will be more. So, a Wayland compositor is not really that much harder anymore. And it will get easier.

The XFCE project is just starting a Wayland compositor project now. It will be built mostly by a single developer. They think they will have a dev release in a few months. They are using Smithay.

Building the Wayland ecosystem took time. But we are basically there. And it is only going to get bigger and better.