Quack Doc

Yes it is, but it’s a necessary one. People aren’t going to go out and learn new tax software. and hell, I still have yet to find a single working crochet program on linux.

Thankfully compatibility now isn’t that bad. I actually did an experiement where I ran entirely in wine’s desktop for a week and it was surprisingly usable.

this is not true. SO many people will download and install whatever. I still get my old customers calling me up for help because they installed some registry cleaners promising to increase their performance by 5x

As someone who used to sell computers to elderly and people who are generally non tech literate, as well as ran computer literacy courses;

ChromeOS + something like flatpak. I don’t think anything else will really work in the current linux world. Holding on hope for Cosmic based DE.

A Distro must have

• Easy AND reliable DE. KDE has been way too buggy and gnome has been way too hard for my parents to use. Old people often have an extremely hard time learning, it needs to replicate what they already know which is either going to be Windows or OSX most likely. Cosmic should be able to do both nicely when ready.

Reliability is so fucking key here I can not understate it. The computer glitching out is entirely unacceptable. They will not be able to do any debugging nor will you likely be on call 24/7 to fix their issues. They also need security so you can’t just “set and forget” either with no updates in a false sense of stability. Older folk copy and paste shit. Permissions and stability is key here. Flatpak has a lot of potential but it’s not there yet.

No real time AV really hurts here.

• Extremely strong app selection with either android or wine app support. Wine is the most preferable. A lot of people are reliant on windows programs for things like tax filing and all sorts of stuff like crochet software and what not. Android apps however can often be good enough and are extremely simple so with a little help, and you will need to help, they can get by with android app support.

• A11y, screenreaders, OSKs, maginifers etc. We need all of it if we want to fit the “generic elderly support”

• Good performance. Elderly people do NOT like updating systems, Their systems will likely be old. And well they are old too. If a system is slower then what they are used to, and generally non responsive, they may think the bloody thing is broken. cough cough gnome cough cough

I genuinely do not that that any DE let alone distro is an acceptable daily driver for “general people” because general people have such a wide variety of use cases and needs. Some folk need crochet and tax software, some folk need CNC software like stitchfiddle, Some need magnifier glasses and speech to text. and man, this is only the more common of things i’ve seen.

Remeber folk, a PC that does 99% of what people generally need, does not mean that it will fit the needs of 99% of people. Here is hoping to a bright future, but I don’t think it will be a close one.

I’ll try it out for sure. Last time what tried river it was fairly basic. So if it’s come a long way that’s quite exciting.

Click baity title aside. This is actually pretty much pretty true. What the vast majority of people want when they’re writing their own composers seems to be specifically the custom window management aspects.

And it is true that even with something like Wlroots or a Smithay, it is a lot of works right your own composer and have it be “competitive”. And he is right. There are a lot of composers out there that are just not usable for anything more than the basics. And there are tons more which are just toys that have been abandoned that aren’t really usable. That being said we saw a lot of that with window managers, But yes, writing a compositor is a lot more then writing a window manager.

I personally don’t use hyperland, but I can see the point he’s trying to make, and I think it’s a rather good point. I think if we had more compositors that focused on having a scriptable window management, then that would be for the better.

I don’t really see this as toxic either. I mean, if it’s toxic to call a composite or trash in one way or another, then I would argue that 90% of the Linux community is far more toxic than he is. It’s just a matter of truth. Wayland is a big complicated thing with a lot of protocols and some of it is poorly documented.

And of course, this is him shilling his own composter. It’s his own composter, and this is the blog about him making his own composter. Of course he’s gonna put a post on it, shilling his own compositor.

That being said, As I said earlier, I would like to see a more scriptable take for things like window management. I don’t think hyprland has to be unique in this aspect, but as it stands, it most definitely is.

pardon my weird language, its hard to use STT.

this is a massive issue even on my tablet too, but many toolkits have this issue

None of them are really great, Im hoping cosmic in the future will be, as it stands.

“Touch primary” DEs (IE. Phone, tablet with no keyboard or detachable etc.) I think are the way to go.

Plasma mobile is king 100% nothing gets remotely close right now.

Phosh I found far too buggy, and the apps are far too limiting. Things like squeekboard for instance don’t scale properly, I had issues running chromium browsers on it too.

Ubuntu touch uses lomiri which im sure is great, I havent had luck running lomiri on any “common generic PC” linux distros. I did try getting it running on arch but found too many issues.

swmo is nice in theory, but it’s missing a lot of the ergonomics.

Plasma mobile is missing a lot. It has some not great design choices I find, however it by far has the best app ecosystem in terms of actual app quality, as well as actually working fine on tablets and phones alike.

For touch secondary experiences I find KDE and Gnome to be just about as you would expect, Both are fine and mostly navigatable on touch only stuff, I would say KDE is often a lot better in terms of responsiveness, Gnome I can find bugs out as @that_leaflet@lemmy.world said. That being said, In portait mode, KDE is down right terrible some times as many KDE desktop apps have zero support for portrait aspect ratios, and you are relying on scaling being “low” enough that the app can fit fine anyways.

as for some stuff you can look forwards to in the future, We are starting to see stuff like catacomb which is designed for phones. I also had some actually great luck with Niri but it’s mostly just buggy, and you still need something to manually launch keyboards.

In terms of applications, I have absurdly high hopes for cosmic apps. Each one I have used this far has a “tiling first” design policy, which translates pretty much 1:1 with being flexible for a phone it turns out, While cosmic apps have really poor touch support, if you install them and pretend your mouse is a finger, you will find that each one is almost perfect in a phone form factor.

EDIT: I wish I could say linux touch was in a good spot but realistically it’s not. I personally recommend just installing something like Bliss or using waydroid as the primary experience. I am very active in the bliss community because in large part tablets and touch support. Android is still far better then linux is in general, even if a little less flexible, you can have a fully foss install like what I have personally.

ah my bad, I had thought I made it clear, I mean the greater android x86, Blisslabs projects like Bliss OS and waydroid, other projects like WSL2, tho that is dead… some chromeOS stuff too.

It’s less secure, but the host<->guest seperation is there.

what does Ubuntu touch have to do with this? I explicitly refered to the greater ax86 ecosystem.

It’s still really basic, but has loads of potential, Unforunately it has a hard requirement on GTK, otherwise there are a few things that would have been nice for greater AX86 in general, for instance they have mediacodec->vaapi support, something ax86 has… struggled with in the past. but we can’t use it since we can’t use gtk.

it’s worth noting that no actual security problems have been presented that haven’t been dealt with, Sandboxing is available on any distro assuming the tools are made availible. Waydroid supports both apparmor and selinux, please report any security issues and tag the maintainers when doing so.

EDIT: you do need to set apparmor into enforce mode manually though.

correct on both accounts.

Thankfully nested compositor, while not perfect, work really well for most use cases.

You won’t get native multi-window support, because I don’t think there are any nested compositors that work like that. There was a project in the past, but I’m pretty sure it’s dead now. However, if you looking for something like a blue stack, it’s alternative where you’re only trying to play one game at a time, then waydroid with a nested compositor will work fine.

I apologize for the rock writing. I’m using speech 2 text.

I actually recommend using Niri lately. It’s not super great, but it does support multi-touch, which is major.

I hope cosmic supports it at some point because cosmic actually supports operating in kiosk mode, and also uses smithay.

There are good amount of applications that are only armed. Google actually might be getting an open source arm to x86 emulator/native bridge.

If they do, then waydroid can include translation directly, but as it stands, there are no open source translators, so it’s not something waydroid can ship.

ofc I do, that is why I explicitly mentioned the features I was talking about…

it was forked a while ago now though so the code bases can be quite different.

very exciting indeed. can’t wait to try it out when federated tickets and PRs are a thing.

Was this the git hosting service that wanted to have things like federated (in this case im talking about cross instance) cloning, searching and issue hosting?

I may be mistaken in general but iirc there was a hosting service like this that I found super interesting, especially in light of things like DMCA abuse against projects hosted on github and gitlab.

EDIT: seems like it is one of two, forgefed is a protocol it will use, activitypub one, very interesting.