Meme, from top to bottom: (Wayland appears) This is the death of the Linux desktop! (SystemD appears) This is the death of the Linux desktop! (Gnome makes massive changes) This is the death of the Linux desktop!
Linux desktop in 2025, having died all the time: over 4.5% marketshare (Michael Jackson as zombie in the background).
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[–] 34 points 1 year ago (5 children)

It's the first time I hear systemd or wayland were spelling the death of the linux desktop (not even gonna mention gnome, it's a choice).

There are controversies around these two, some extremely valid, some a bit over the top, but both do work adequately for the vast majority of common use cases. I'd even argue that systemd (the init process) is better as far as being user friendly. And I say "user", not "poweruser" nor "sysadmin". And wayland is an opportunity to clear some long-lasting backward stuff, and even though it is possible to find issue today, for regular (and new) users, it has no bearing on the usability of their system.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    a lot of people actually welcome wayland, systemd is the one they refuse to touch and I've seen less backlash against the Gnome/Systemd coupling than I anticipated!

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, wayland good, etc etc.

    Now we're at the point where wayland is becoming the only option, while there are still some things that don't work well, like showing up a modal, opening a context menu in a window that wasn't in focus, copy/pasting from non foreground UI applications… All this under KDE, which is somewhat large in terms of good DE.

    I understand the argument that if we have to move, we have to start the move at some point. But I'm not sure we have to move. People keep telling X is a messy dangerous unmaintained eldritch horror sucking on your souls every seconds, but as a user, if moving back to X fixes all the tiny weird issues and shows no obvious downside, it's hard to justify the switch.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's the first time I hear systemd [...] were spelling the death of [...] linux

    Where've you been? We've been expressing concern about its badly-built badly-architected metastatic creep for a decade of dwindling choice and competition as it slowly forced out dissent and clued concern.

    Now it's eaten autofs, DNS, cron, NTPd, and replaced them with shitty clones, and has carefully eroded our ability to recover from this mess.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    First, I said "the init process". The systemd project reinventing the wheel at every occasion is half garbage half "yeah, it's not horrible, but we're going to iron it out again for the next decades" level of horror. You won't have to convince me of that. And don't get me started on "binary" logs that sometimes takes dozen of seconds to just show up when requested. But the management of services is an overall improvement over scripts stitched together.

    I'm well aware of these discussions.

    But systemd management, and overall presence, is not something most people would care about. From a user perspective, the system boots, and things works (mostly). To non admin user, running a systemd system or a sysvinit system or whatever is irrelevant.

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