If we're talking about mass adoption of Linux then there really has to be no concept of even "picking a camp". The vast majority of users - even techy people - will not understand what a window manager is, never mind be capable of choosing one.
Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
Hard disagree. You can run the same programs on any DE or Window Manager or even without one (on pure X11 for example). That's not a hurdle it's a feature.
Users who don't know about the feature can just use a pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these things.
Linux user for decades, but headless since the early aughts. Decided to dip my toes back into the desktop space with Mint Cinnamon.
I can mirror or run lots of phone apps on Windows or macOS, but ironically, not Linux. I decide to run an Android emulator so I can use some phone-only apps.
I read up on reviews, then download and install Waydroid as the top contender.
Does Waydroid work? No. It fails silently launching from the shortcut after the install. Run it from the command line, and, nope, it's a window manager issue. Mint Cinnamon uses X11, not Wayland, and Waydroid apparently needs... Wayland support.
OK, I log out, log into Mint with Wayland support, then re-launch Waydroid. My screen goes into a fugue state where it randomly alternates between black and the desktop. Try a variety of things, and I guess this is just how it is. Google and try any number of fixes, end up giving up.
Yes, that's my old pal Linux on the Desktop. Older, faster and wiser, but still flaky in precisely the same ways.
You can't run X11 programs on Wayland without Xwayland.
Likewise you cannot run Wayland programs on X11 without a wayland compositor like Cage (a wayland kiosk) or Weston. Both run as a window on X11 inside of which Waydroid works just fine.
It's an odd complaint that incompatible software is incompatible.
I did. I agree it's not obvious.
But you cannot run OpenGL, Vulkan, Glide or DirectX on Windows either without having the proper hardware and software installed.
So yeah. Waydroid needs wayland. Anbox runs on X11.
> OpenGL, Vulkan, Glide or DirectX on Windows either without having the proper hardware and software installed
Windows will run at least basic OpenGL and DirectX in software if you don't have hardware to accelerate that, and those software renderers are included as part of the OS. It'll run like garbage, but it will run.
Bluestacks works fine for this on PC and Mac, and I've seen casuals use that because they want to play their gacha game on a bigger screen.
Waydroid compleatly fails in comparison, while giving you no pointers on what the problem might be or how to solve it unless you're already a Linux power user.
Headless daily driver? Hardcore. What do you use for a browser?
I've tried it as a challenge for a couple of days (lynx, mutt, some other TUI stuff) and it made some things like Vim stick (although that may have as much to do with that challenge as Tridactyl did). But I couldn't last longer than a week. It does free you from the burden of system requirements. CPU: Optional.
w3m can even display images in a linux console if you have the proper drivers or use KMSCON. It unwieldy but surprisingly usable. And my laptop battery runs for 8 hours which is quite amazing for a Zen1.
I imagine your display is almost entirely black for the majority of the time, with your (most probably) LCD backlight blasting away, trying its hardest to get a few thousandths of its light output through the few pixels on the screen that it can escape! XD
Brightness down, LAN card disabled (the media sense on RTL cards sucks about 1.5W with no cable plugged in, wtf? Thats more than the Wifi needs)
And powertop (great piece of software, thanks Intel) tuned to the max + powersave scheduler.
All that on Windows or KDE results in about 4-5h of battery though. So fbdev must be somehow really frugal.
> That's cause you're using a distro like mint which is using older builds of stuff.
The context here is that I was commenting on the parent's assertion that one "can just use a pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these things." Nope!
> It will continue to degrade for you unless you fully switch to a Wayland DM. Anything built on X11 is basically deprecated now and no one is building on it anymore.
That's my impression as well, and again, with the 2nd most popular Linux distro using X11 by default and with "experimental" Wayland support, that only reinforces my rebuttal of parent's claim.
> Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
Just like Linux. You can run most if not all apps in any DE. Yes gnome will look ugly, but that's gnome's way of doing things. If you pick a decent DE, you will have most basic apps using the same styling, and the rest have CSD anyway.
Each GUI toolkit has its own specialties, but you'll use at most two of them, and they will be kept in separate apps. (Apart from flatpak portals which use gtk instead of the system's).
Windows has 3-5 different UI/UX layers within the same application ... And the rest have CSD anyway, so they look the same no matter the OS.
> Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.
I mean this is a solved problem on linux using modern distributions like NixOS or even 'normal' distros with flatpak, appimage, etc. I haven't had to deal with anything like this in years.
The windows UIs are way more different than linux was. There was a time in the 90s where UIs were expected to follow platform specifics. These days, most UIs don't and they're almost kind of like the branding. Thus, this is not as big a deal as you're making it out to be. If anything, things like the gnome apps and gtk4 are more consistent than any windows app.
No, it's not about users picking a camp, it's about developers.
It's been a long, long time since I've seen an application utterly fail to load because it's a GTK/QT/etc framework running under a totally different DE.
Gnome apps look ugly as hell under KDE[0], but they still work. As a user, you don't need to know or care in any way. It'll run on your machine.
[0]I don't know if they're ugly because of incompatibility or if that's just How Gnome Is. I suspect the latter
Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.