Me, a new Linux convert, watching all the infighting over minutiae:
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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"I love a good sitcom!"
"Oh, what's your favourite? Friends? Seinfeld? Fesh Pince?"
"None, it's wayland-protocols"
A sitcom about linux developers who constantly argue about minutia could actually be fun if written correctly. They could borrow a bunch of real life incidents and write them in.
GNOME: "...and that's why I think client-side decorations are the greatest. What do you guys think?"
The camera zooms out to reveal all other desktop environments staring, stone-faced, at GNOME. After a moment, KDE speaks up:
"You really can't help putting your foot in your mouth."
Laugh track plays at 300% volume, followed by the Seinfeld outro.
Make the seinfeld outro deep fried, like that thomas the tank engine tune and you got yourself a deal buckaroo
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There's a Youtube channel that mostly just follows the wayland bug tracker.
Please link?
Ouch, I don't follow him, YT just sends me the videos all the time.
It's officially about Linux, so I'm not sure I've got it right. I think it's this one:
Be careful:
And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
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Linux users are peaceful* and level-headed*.
* barring discussions about Wayland, X11's obsolescence, Systemd, Pipewire, Rust in the kernel, or even UEFI at times
Donβt forget arch btw
It's NixOS and CachyOS these days.
Do you even nix, bro? I have Nix on my company issued Windows laptop inside WSL, btw.
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I tried to use Wayland. My windows flickered to black. I switched to X11. No issue. I'll try Wayland again next year. -casual Linux user
Narrator voice: "Six years later, they still haven't tried it again."
I try every year and every year I get a different result. Currently on Wayland, next year's update might force me back to X.
Love the Wayland stability.
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UEFI is OK. Try mentioning Secure Boot.
Even UEFI has its haters, and they're calling for a return to BIOS in the aftermath of the Gigabyte UEFI vulnerability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTjj1ILCwRs (scroll through the comments)
fuck the bios stage, just load grub from firmware
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Do users care about Rust in the kernel? The others all make sense.
You bet. Not many, but they are extremely ~~passionate~~ emotional about it. They mostly grace the anti-intellectual cesspools with their presence (twitter and such).
I used to be like that, about two years ago, mainly because of some bad experiences with compiling Rust programs from source. Then I realized that I'm literally never going to be affected by it since I never compile the kernel myself. Now I'm learning Rust myself.
If anything, the memory safe Rust should be encouraged...
It's not just about memory safety, honestly. Rust is a modern programming language. C is a fucking fossil buried in a tar pit of unmaintained libraries and workarounds. A newly minted programmer won't likely choose C as their primary language when things like C#, Python, and Rust are available (I work in a university, I see what our students do), and the current generation of C-only maintainers will eventually retire, with nobody to replace them. Being openly hostile and abusive against Rust will hurt the kernel in the long term.
This is the Dreadnought effect once again. A new thing appears that thoroughly changes the landscape, and the people who can't adapt push back with fear and violence. Crossbows and arbalests have been effective for centuries, who needs this ridiculous new "gun" thing?
I mean, take a look at it from their POV: You've spent decades building this and suddenly new people come in and want to change very fundamental things in the project. Replacing them with something you don't know and don't want to learn.
Change must be slow and steady and shouldn't make the original developers feel like they're being pushed out.
Both sides are severely lacking in considering the people on the other side.
change very fundamental things in the project
That's not what's happening. Right now, modules written in Rust are completely independent from modules written in C. If a Rust module wants to interact with a C module, it has to use that module's API, as it is intended. If that API changes, the Rust module has to adapt to it. Nobody is forcing C developers to change anything they don't want to. In the latest tantrum, a kernel developer called Christoph Hellwig was exposed sabotaging Rust projects: he was NACKing Rust PRs that interacted with the DRM API even though they touched none of the code he was maintaining, nor required any changes be made by a C developer. In the fallout, two Asahi/ARM developers left the mainline kernel, and one of them retired completely because of burnout.
Wrong opinions can exist if they are formed using incorrect assumptions. Hellwig had no right to sabotage the Rust projects, and certainly no right to call Rust-for-Linux developers a cancer on the LKML.
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It beats the alternative of Microsoft's support forums where thousands comment for weeks straight INCLUDING paid Indian "representatives" who ask for user diagnostic tool output, copy/pasting the same reply eleventeen thousand times a day, on a post from 8 years ago BUT not a single person has ever posted their solution EXCEPT "I reinstalled Windows."
have you tried running sfc /scannow ?
oh, it succeeded? uh, run dism /online anway, that should work
This was such a frustrating experience. I could probably count on one hand how many times I found a useful solution that wasnβt just copy paste
I love the drama :3.. gives me a great sense of schadenfreude. Unless the devs whose side im on are losing the debate
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What's great about the drama is you can just ignore it and everything still works.
More like:
That why linux is great, it open-sources its drama so everyone can enjoy it
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This is the way. "I just use Linux" is what I always say.
I'm considered tech support for my team at work, their always saying things like "well you're the Linux guy so you know how this stuff works". And then I have to explain "I just use Linux, I don't write the code, plus these are windows machines so it's completely different issues, and lastly I just type the problem into Google read the results and then tell you what I read"
Them: well you are still tech support because I don't know how to do that.
Me: wait you don't know how to type into Google.....no you know what fine, I'm tech support, tell management so I can get a raise.
Hi, former tech support (now cybersecurity) here. You /are/ tier one tech support. You handle it pretty much how they do, knowledge base documents and searching for solutions online. If things get really bad they might poke around directly and see if they can find a root cause before they escalate.
That doesn't mean they can demand you do anything, but it does mean you shouldn't underestimate yourself :)
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Fighting means that you care.
The thing is, one of the big root causes behind those fights is also a root cause of what makes Linux and FOSS so great: The devs care about the software and its users. Their priority is making the right decision for the application and its users. That's a pretty stark contrast to certain other mainstream operating systems where the primary stakeholders are not the devs or the users -- it's some third party a thousand miles away who only cares whether the dev teams' decisions sprinkle a few more dollar bills on top of their cash mountain.
I'm not part of those fights and defending them, btw. I just use Mint and appreciate their efforts!
Me following the recent bcachefs drama
(Kent is objectively in the wrong & slightly bat shit, if you follow his many discussions in various forums where he defends himself)
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I think it's mostly the other way around. The developers are chill while the user base frothing with tribalism
I think the tribalism is mostly in jest. I've never actually seen two Linux users seriously fighting over their preferred distro or init system or whatever.
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It's both.
Christoph Hellwig, a kernel contributor, and a bunch of anti-Rust fossils, were sabotaging Rust-for-Linux projects for using their C APIs for months until Torvalds intervened, and have been actively hostile and abusive against R4L contributors until they left the project. Summary by Aussie Linux Man.
XLibre, headed by a... shall we say, interesting figure, has attracted a rabid fanbase who are frothing at the mouth and calling Wayland woke DEI garbage that will destroy Linux. The first day of the git repo saw threats of gun violence, the antisemitic (((triple parenthesis))) dog whistle, openly transphobic statements by non-developers, and the owner's commitment to allow all of that under the banner of being "non-political". More context here, in the comments.
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I love it when old crusty maintainers obstruct the progress of memory safe (read: Rust) code in the Linux Kernel!!!
Then venting your frustrations about that on Mastodon gets you labeled a brigading "maybe you are the problem" by Linus ((:
I dunno. As a supporter of Asahi from the week the Patreon was launched, Iβm pretty bummed that the lead dev got disheartened and dropped off. Kernel devs protecting fiefdoms (by blocking Rust adoption) do not a happy user make (for me).
Ok what is it this time? What did I miss
"Ah yes, I survived the great systemd/init war..."
I'm sure there's drama within any sort of closed source software company too. Although most of that drama will instead be project managers (the evil of this world) forcing their bullshit into the face of developers, until those developers burn out and start a potato farm.
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