Except the ones that aren’t.

Why do I care about the state of the code? It works. Perhaps all these people complaining are really just sick of your proselytization.

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, “You only get one life. You can pick up five causes on any street corner.”

That’s cool and all, but why would I want to? Display systems are invisible when they work right, and X has worked right for me (save for some pre-EDID config issues) since the 90s. I run a program, it pops up on my screen and I interact with it. That’s all I ask of it.

None of the issues I’ve had with X (drivers, mostly) will be resolved with Wayland. For me, it’s a solution in search of a problem. The only reason I have even a passing interest is that it’s (theoretically) easier to maintain and change as computing changes.

I’ll move to Wayland when I have to, but right now there’s no reason to not use X.

I wasn’t clear. I meant that the issues with X crashing were usually driver issues. I have no idea about Wayland - I don’t use it since it doesn’t do what I want by design.

X does the job well enough to be invisible to most people. Yes, we need a clean start in order to move forward efficiently (lots of assumptions about computer displays from the 80s no longer apply), but it’s good enough for most people’s needs.

Why bother with a display server? Some people - like myself - actually use that functionality. It’s not part of the design for Wayland. Personally, I think that’s a mistake - especially as things become more cloud-based - but I’m obviously in the minority.

Wayland wasn’t the first attempt at replacing X. It has made more traction than any other attempt, though. There’s no real hurry - it’s not like X eats your babies and runs over your dog.

As far as robustness goes, that’s mostly the driver. I’ve yet to see a bulletproof display system, commercial or non-commercial. If you cut out driver issues, X is on par with or more stable than other systems. It had better be, given that it’s had decades of bug fixes with few new features to cause new bugs.

Instead of Satanic rituals, it’s improvisation and arithmetic.

That, and they might be using Object Pascal. I don’t know (I haven’t touched Pascal in thirty years) but I would not be surprised if there’s some overhead there.

You’re listening to loud asshats and assuming they’re the majority. They’re not.

One day Wayland will reach a tipping point where it will replace X. Until then, most users will just stick with whatever their distro installs. Most people don’t care one way or another.

As for me, I’m probably gonna to stick with X until I have no choice because I actually use the network features that Wayland isn’t replacing. That doesn’t mean I hate Wayland - I’ve never used it - it just means it’s not the best software for me at this time. Most people never do anything with X that Wayland can’t do and won’t notice when it becomes the default.

Naw, we just buy ones where the lattice is diagonal.

In other words, we install X Windows.

Damn straight. MIT license is where it’s at.

What’s that I hear? It sounds like Grace Hopper cackling from the grave…

That might help with the tankies, but it won’t fill in for the specialized subreddits I used to visit. There just aren’t enough people on Lemmy.

It’s been bad for me.

All those hate filled posts everyone talks about? I never saw those on Reddit, because I had a couple dozen technical subs (r/emacs, r/PLC, etc.) that I’d browse and rarely if ever strayed from those. Reddit was big enough that the specialized subreddits generated enough content for my use case.

Some of those communities exist here, but they’re practically empty. So I wind up doom scrolling on All, which is full of tankie garbage and political propaganda.

I dunno, while I like the idea of Lemmy, I don’t think it’s likely to ever get the traffic you need for my kind of use. I probably just need to diversify my phone use and visit other sites.

Alt-x shell-mode

There you go.

A1: Sure, but why would we want to?

A2: Yes, it’s :q![Enter]emacs[Enter]

It has one. It’s called evil-mode.

Not in my experience. It’s all just “go out and vote!”

I’m not arguing against people being informed. I’m arguing against uninformed people being encouraged to vote.

High voter turnout does change the results in many cases, but generally that’s simple negative feedback. Average Americans didn’t have to be well informed to vote against Trump in 2020, for instance - Trump saw to that when he made an ass of himself publicly on a regular basis. And people notice things like wars and recessions and whatnot. That’s not the same as an informed voter base.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating tests or anything for voting. We’ve seen what that leads to.

I’m thinking more along the lines of self-determination. If someone has no interest or knowledge of politics, they should refrain from voting.

Now, continue that train of thought. Imagine that the person not voting is one of the politically ignorant mentioned in the quote.

What are they going to do at the polls? Are they going to add signal or noise? What is accomplished by them choosing a candidate at random?

Letting people who are informed make decisions for you happens all the time. Engineers and safety officers determine speed limits. Architects determine how the buildings you enter are constructed. Panels of electricians, firemen, and manufacturers determine the electrical codes that keep your house from randomly catching fire or electrocuting you. Interested people organize community events you attend. What makes politics any different?

My personal ideal would be that only the informed vote. Anyone has the right to become involved, as well as the right to abstain and accept the choice of their peers. Unfortunately, many people form their political opinions in echo chambers and are less informed than they think.