Ah yes, the literal embodiment of “announcing the new OpenTormentNexus!”.

But also more generally, the whole attitude of “you’re just a Luddite who’s HOLDING US BACK!!” that people do. See also systemd.

(I don’t like systemd for completely different reasons (political rather than technical) but the very similar “you just need to get with the times!!!” attitude is also a massive turnoff for basically the same reason.)

(Also see also Rust. Ditto.)

By contrast, Pipewire? Legitimate improvement. It’s not just a “change bad” thing. There’s a reason Wayland/systemd/rust are controversial and Pipewire isn’t. A lot of it is the attitude, I think. People aren’t forcing Pipewire, either, and on the app side most stuff seems to still be the Pulseaudio API which is completely fine and means you can use either.

Hah, yeah, you probably don’t have a CRT monitor!

Having custom resolution support is INCREDIBLY important for them, because they have no native resolution and you can just throw pretty much anything at them and it looks fantastic. It’s great for getting high refresh rates in games, especially since decreasing the resolution means you don’t have to work as hard for that framerate, without the nastiness of upscaling.

And also our monitor reports 1280x1024 as the highest resolution. Which… is the wrong aspect ratio. ??? So we NEED custom resolutions to even have a usable monitor.

KDE finally came out with support for this… in a version that’s not in Debian yet… like, one major release before dropping X11 support completely. And pretty much every other desktop on the planet is just out in the cold (except for all the window managers that base off of wlroots or something, I think it has an equivalent). Gnome? Good fucking luck.

Oh and screenshot tools. Those are tied to the DE now! Want to use a competing screenshot tool? You just… uh… can’t. I mean we’re on KDE and Spectacle is pretty great so it doesn’t really affect us, but if we didn’t like Spectacle, we’d be more or less screwed under Wayland.

Also scaling the screen. I don’t mean widget toolkit scaling. I mean e.g. integer scaling the screen pixels from 1920x1080 to 4K, a simple 2x2 for 4K TVs, or what-have-you. (Because 4K TVs don’t do this themselves even though they really should.) Or going the other way, rendering at 1280x960 and then downscaling to 640x480 so our CRT can get 120Hz. Easy on X11. Straight-up impossible on Wayland.

Oh yeah, and did I mention temporarily (not as default) disabling our PS4 controller’s trackpad from working as a mouse, without disabling any other trackpad on the system, without disabling its ability to work as a button or whatever in Steam Input? That too.

Stuff like that.

I don’t think anything defaulting to Wayland is guaranteed trash, but I also think there should be way more X11 pitchfork people. Or at least less hatred directed at them when they pop up.

“just get with the times it’s THE FUTURE and you’re not allowed to say no!” is… not cool. Especially when Wayland is unusable for anything outside of “the ordinary”, by design.

– Frost

It’d be really nice if it was like Wii, where you can have the emulated console do an online system update and bang, there’s your whole OS… or failing that, the entire system is on every game disc, just in case… but nooo can’t have that.

And honestly, in the coming age of “OSes that don’t spy on you will be illegal!!”, I’m really, really glad for that. We’ve got the entire 27-ISO set of Debian 13.0.0 squirreled away. There’s even more discs for the sources, and they go to great lengths to ensure that everything can be built with no external dependencies that aren’t available in the archive.

Debian: It’s Apocalypse-Proof.™

– Frost

Haha yeah! :3 I uh, misread the critter I replied to as saying “I don’t get it” rather than “I’m not even interested in getting it”. Cue the massive infodump. >,,>

I’m not that sorry, though. It’s still fun to talk about and also kinda hilarious that it happened.

– Frost

Debian is weird in even having non-live ISOs, but they do have various live ones with different desktops! (Don’t grab the one from the homepage, grab one of the live ones instead.)

Yeah! https://www.debian.org/CD/live/, the little teeny “live KDE” link. =^.^=

You don’t want the “netinst” ISO on the main page. It technically works, but it’s a pain to use and needs internet access to install. Its only redeeming quality is the small download size and fitting on a CD (if you’re burning it to a CD-R which is unlikely).

Nope! I’m a wolf! :3

I’m trans, but for species instead of gender. Yeah that’s a thing. 🐺

– Frost

I mean, I could just go “TLDR grab Debian’s live KDE edition” if that’s easier!

The whole point in me explaining all that is that people don’t know all this stuff. That’s why I’m explaining it. I did gloss over the fact that distros exist, but it seems like the person I’m replying to already knows that multiple versions of Linux are a thing so that’s not a huge issue.

And going “here’s some options to pick from” helps if it turns out you’ve got different priorities than we do. But yeah, “TLDR Debian” is also good if you’re overwhelmed.

Funnily enough, Gajim from Flatpak (1.9.5) does drag and drop just fine!

I can’t remember what version we’ve got on our laptop– [can’t we just check packages.debian.org?] right! It’s 2.1.1-2, apparently. Good to hear that 2.2.0 is non-adwaitified, that sounds like a good place to fork from.

– Frost

Anything with the KDE desktop!

That’s a neat thing about Linux, the look and feel is actually totally separate from the distro. Everyone focuses on distros when really, that’s mostly under-the-hood stuff, the look and feel is the desktop environment.

KDE is windows-10-like (out of the box, you can also rearrange the crap out of it, ours is set up more like Mac!) and also happens to be one of the most full-featured desktop environments, so you won’t be missing stuff (like HDR support or whatever).

So, a distro with KDE.

Debian is great if you want something that Does Not Break on you. Ever. It will never throw you a curveball with an update. That also means you just won’t really get updates very much, outside of a Big Major Upgrade every couple of years. If you’re tired of Windows Update screwing with you, Debian’s perfect.

Fedora is pretty good if you want the new shinies all the time. Major updates every 6 months. Debian has a bigger appstore and even stuff that isn’t in there often provides .deb packages, which Fedora can’t run, but it’s not a huge deal.

Mint doesn’t have a convenient KDE version (but you can install KDE after the fact). It has its own desktop called Cinnamon. More Windows 7 vibes. It’s based on Debian so you get the Debian compatibility, as well, and they put work into making sure you have GUI apps for stuff like installing drivers (Debian you might need a terminal command or three during initial setup).

There’s also immutable distros like Bazzite, which is basically SteamOS But Desktop. It also comes with similar restrictions to SteamOS, though. Good for an Appliance Computer, an absolute fucking pain if you ever need to install drivers/VR stuff/other system software or what-have-you. I’d avoid for your main computer.

– Frost

I’m a furry and even I don’t get most furries, haha!

Like, I’m here to be an animal. I heard “people who like to be animals” and went “whoa, sign me up!” and it turns out a lot of furries DON’T like to be animals, they just… pretend to be animals but “oh that’s a character not really me” and they still consider themselves human…?.. also they’re only half-human-half-animals, not actual animal shape either?.. I don’t get it

turns out most of the actual “I’m just an animal” animals are the therians instead (once I found them I decided I’d be both). I’m still a non-character, non-anthropomorphic (the furry jargon for normal animal shape is “feral”) furry though, and the anthro furries can just deal. :3

– Frost

That makes sense!

That’s a thing?? Whoa. The wooden ones SUCK, plastic is alright but plastic… how are the potato ones to clean? One of the nice things about the plastic ones is you can clean them and keep them around in your bag for next time you need a spoon.

a) you’re using “animal” like an insult. That’s not cool.

and b) calling shitty people “not people” isn’t cool either.

and c) just to reiterate, by contrast, animals (human or not) are people, and calling them “subhuman” is just… dude.

– Frost

This is why we run Gajim 1.9.5 in flatpak.

Which. Got removed from flathub, so to install it on our laptop, we had to do some kind of weird flatpak sideloading thing.

On our laptop we’ve been using Gajim 2.something from Debian 13 (our desktop runs testing so we can’t do that there). It’s not Full Gnomified. It also locks up whenever we try dragging a picture into the chat window to send. So… yeah.

Someone should fork Gajim pre-2.

Oof, yikes. 🧡 Maybe switching instance to a more chill place would help?

If people are jumping on you like that, that should a thing your mods can deal with. I don’t know if lemmy.world has the kind of mod team that would go out of their way to protect you from this kinda shit (since they’re a big generalist instance), but if not, you’re likely to get better moderation on a smaller server. Like how we’re on pawb.social and it’s probably pretty good here. Just like, having a place with admins who care. But it might be worth bringing the stuff up to the lemmy.world mod team, because if they can handle it it’s easier than packing up and moving.

(We’re not teen here, but are also Super Online. And also various forms of queer and otherwise marginalized so yeah, I get it.)

– Frost

The server you’re on!

Like how you’re on infosec.pub, the OP is on break3.social, the community (subreddit equivalent) is on lemmy.world, and I’m on pawb.social. :3

– Frost