TeX Hour: Thu 26 October: Share our Linux experience

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Jonathan,

> Administration. More exactly, I'm installing Arch Linux on my PC, with a
[...]
> By the way, a major motive for my switching to Arch is to get better
> support for Wayland, the emerging replacement to X-Windows, which is now

I have been using Arch as my main system for more than a year now, on my
desktop (nvidia GPU) based on X, as well as on my laptop (intel GPU)
based on Wayland.

A few comments:
- arch is great, but you need to know your way around the system
- Wayland has improved from what, 10 years ago when it was proposed as
  the successor, and it finally can be used (with some caveats)
- wayland does not give you anything better than X, besides better
  security if you are concerned that one program you are running is
  stealing the input of another program. Everything else is just made
  more complicated by Wayland
- Wayland is completely broken with respect to *resilience*:
  When my X session dies, the apps are still running and I can close
  them in a proper way using the kbd.
  When my Wayland session dies, *some* programs might reconnect to the
  replacement wayland server, but that is Russian^WWayland roulette. In
  my (repeated) experience, all applications are torn down and SIG 9
  terminated. That much for resilience
- Multimedia on wayland? Get the freaking edge of development (Arch) to
  have success sharing windows (not only the full desktop), or audio,...
  Wayland is just basically broken in this respect. There is work
  ongoing to add protocols to support this, but again, X did it 40 years
  ago and Wayland is still running after it

So, from someone who has tried Wayland several times over the last 5-10
years, and now is running Wayland on one work system, I just can say
that it does not give you anything we didn't have before ... only more
pain.

Probably a good combination with installing Arch, in the end we enjoy
inflicting pain on ourselves!

Enjoy

Norbert

PS: I would happily join, but the timing is so bad for JST that this is
never possible.

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
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