qwesx

dpkg-reconfigure sysvinit

I don’t remember what I was trying to achieve, but it was a bad idea. I also didn’t (and still don’t) know how to fix the outcome of this, so - since my home was on a separate partition anyway - I just reinstalled Debian since that was much quicker anyway.

That something entirely different than the protocol being biased towards Linux. It’s like complaining that TCP/IP is biased towards Linux because the Linux kernel’s networking module can’t be used in BSD kernels.

A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications: Yes, because the compositor IS the server, window manager AND compositor at the same time.

Maybe not anymore in the future: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6_wayland_robustness/

Wayland is biased towards Linux and breaks BSD

FreeBSD already has working Wayland compositors by the way.

X11 and Wayland are just protocols. These protocols are used to abstract the window drawing from the actual hardware and runtime environment as much as reasonably possible - because nobody wants to maintain 3215 versions of their app for different runtime environments. So in order to be shown on the screen an app needs to implement either the X11 or the Wayland protocol (or both!).

The piece of software that is on the other side depends on whether the app is using X11 or Wayland. For the sake of simplicity let’s assume that the app does only support one of those. If the app supports Wayland then it will try to connect to a Wayland compositor. The compositor implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app. If the app supports X11 then it will try to connect to a X server and take the role of an X client. This is (on Linux, essentially) always X.org*. X.org also implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app.

* Unless you’re running a Wayland compositor, then it will connect to XWayland which passes through the window to your compositor.

Wayland compositors have full control over the apps while the abilities of apps are purposefully restricted.
A window manager is just another regular, boring, old X client connecting to the X server. It doesn’t actually abstract anything. It can move windows because the X11 protocol allows it to, but any other X client could just as well move all other windows around, read all user input to all other windows and even move the mouse around as it pleases.

So, to be specific, there is no mouse pointer bug in Virtualbox while using Wayland. There is a mouse pointer bug affecting specific Wayland compositors, likely because they enforce GPU hardware acceleration that is lacking in either your VM or the Linux kernel because of missing drivers. Try using a different compositor, (re)installing Virtualbox Guest Additions with the correct version on the guest system and/or check whether hardware acceleration is enabled for the VM and has enough video memory.

Thank you for explaining what Wayland really is: a protocol. I see way too many people in forums going “Wayland constantly crashes” or “this doesn’t work with Wayland” but what they actually mean is that their compositor of choice crashes or lacks a feature. There are a few things that Wayland doesn’t support (like multiple-main-window-apps that want to put their children relative to each other (i.e. multi-window Gimp)), but that’s usually not what’s being discussed.

But please allow me to correct you on a few details:

• X is not a server. X.org is the single remaining “big” X server in use which replaced XFree86 a long long time ago. X is commonly available as a shortcut to start the main X server installation though.
• X11 is not “an unmaintainable mess”. X11 isn’t as simple anymore as it used to be, but certainly not in an unmaintainable manner. But writing a new X server from scratch is about as much work as untangling the unmaintainable mess that is X.org

far more efficient than with X11

In theory. The issue is that, at this point in time, the vast majority of software that actually needs this efficiency (read: video games) run on XWayland, which adds a bit of overhead which ultimately causes them to run slightly slower on Wayland compositors compared to X.org. Maybe this will change at some point as devs patch their native games to check for a Wayland compositor by default and the big set of Wayland-support-patches makes its way into wine (and hopefully proton).

X12 actually exists. That said, it never went further than an extremely rough draft and was abandoned at some point, ultimately in favor of Wayland.

I don’t know about the creators of this project, but in general: So that they can use the stuff in their closed source applications while finding enough contributors to write software for them for free.

Have a separate home partition and just keep using it across distributions?

So that people can’t easily track how much time is spent on getting round window corners compared to how much time is spent not implementing thumbnails in a file chooser dialog?

18 years, by the way.

Screwed up fonts in GTK software, even though the xdg-portal app for KDE is installed. At some point I just gave up. I see no reason to install any Flatpak if the software in question is already in the distro’s repository and current enough anyway. Maybe except OBS, because the Flatpak version comes with Youtube integration which, to my understanding, needs to remain closed source and won’t make it into a FOSS repository.

Do you mount the drives using their /dev/sdX entries or via UUID? Because it sounds like you’re using /dev/sdX entries (which you really shouldn’t, because their names can randomly change, by design). Use /dev/disk/by-id/... directly for mounting or, alternatively, fill /etc/zfs/vdev_id.conf (see example below) and define the pool using their aliases.

alias Bay1 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XXXXXXXXXXX1-YYYYY1_ZZZZZZZ4
alias Bay2 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XXXXXXXXXXX2-YYYYY2_ZZZZZZZ4
alias Bay3 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XXXXXXXXXXX3-YYYYY3_ZZZZZZZ4
alias Bay4 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XXXXXXXXXXX4-YYYYY3_ZZZZZZZ4

I hope Microsoft will never go with the subscription based OS approach that is being rumored about. I seriously can’t afford that much popcorn.

That’s my personal experience, as well.

try KiCad it’s not Eagle

And that’s a good thing, according to my MSc. in Electronics colleague. We replaced EAGLE with KiCad a few years ago because it’s just a better product ever since CERN essentially took over development.

I like how the majority of the list is “stuff that doesn’t exists on Linux can’t be properly used on Linux”. Yeah, no fucking shit, Sherlock.
I also like how it’s supposed to be about the “average user” and then lists a ton of stuff that’s only used in niche applications when put in relation to the entire desktop market.

Additionally:

People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;

A good amount of old games won’t run properly on Windows anymore, either.

I can’t see any of the downvotes that DerisionConsulting mentioned, possibly because I’m on kbin, but I can absolutely understand why people would downvote this completely braindead article that doesn’t mention a lot of the actual issues (i.e. hardware compatibility on laptops, friction from the slow transition from X to Wayland, inconsistent user interfaces, updates breaking stuff on some distros, …).

This is generally good advice. Would you run the program without a sandbox? No? Then you probably shouldn’t run it inside a sandbox either.
You can never be sure that the program isn’t using a flaw in the sandbox to break out or is just piggybacking onto a whitelisted action that is required for the program’s basic functionality.

And if some program requires r/w for your entire home directory and network access then you might as well not use a sandbox in the first place because it can already do everything useful that it needs to do.

Correct, Java is only needed for (letter) templates and macros.
I used it for years without any JVM installed… until I wanted to use a template. :(

If you’re using Snapper does that mean that you’re using btrfs? If so, you can use btrfs send and btrfs receive to respectively save or restore a snapshot to/from a file. Well copied from zfs ;-)

Or at the very least partition ~ as btrfs/zfs and do regular snapshots. The downside is, of course, that a rollback won’t just roll back the dotfiles. But I guess if the scenario is “nuking [the] home directory” then that’s probably not an issue.

If you have mouse acceleration on KDE when selecting the “flat” profile then

• you’re accidentally running Plasma as an X11 session and suffer from a libinput issue, or
• your mouse has an internal acceleration profile that can be disabled using the manufacturer’s Windows-only software (or some enthusiast project on Github), Logitech mice often have this feature