KDE Neon Weirdness.

KDE Neon Weirdness.

Last night, KDE Neon released almost 100 updates. I’ve generally had a pleasant experience with this distribution so far.

However, when I rebooted, I connected my HDMI cable to the TV and proceeded to watch a movie in Dragon Player.

While I was watching the movie, the screen in the laptop apparently froze up, although the movie continued playing, so I didn’t notice until the movie was done.

When I pressed the power button, the logout screen showed up and started a 30 second countdown until shutdown. I couldn’t move the mouse pointer, so I just let it shut the computer down.

When it came back up, all the icons in SDDM were broken. My WiFi was turned off, and my Bluetooth was impossible to turn back on again, so my mouse wouldn’t work.

Then I turned the WiFi on and came across a suggested command (as root) “rfkill list”, and it told me my Bluetooth was “soft blocked”, so I used (as root) “rfkill unblock bluetooth”. It let me turn Bluetooth back on and my mouse started working again.

But the icons on SDDM were broken. Someone in the KDE Neon chatroom suggested switching to Breeze Dark icons, logging out, logging in, and switching back. However, I already use Breeze Dark and those were the only icons listed that could be selected.

Then while I was trying to figure that out, the system tray started malfunctioning. Clicking icons in the system tray did not bring up that icon’s menu, just an empty “dot”.

Well, on a lark, logging out, selecting “KDE on X11”, and trying it again made the system tray work again, so I logged out, selected “KDE on Wayland” and it remained working.

Today, I installed more updates, and among them it included a new version of Breeze Icons, and now my icons are correct on SDDM (the display manager) and regular Breeze (the light version) shows up again.

I really wish that they would wait until the entire update is available before pushing anything out. I must have somehow ended up with mismatched packages from two separate versions of Plasma Workspaces and weird things started happening to my computer.

I’ve mentioned several times that “Linux and open source stuff in general” is nowhere near as reliable as it was even in 2007. In so many places, it’s like we’ve taken one step forward and three steps back. Just not any one thing, but everything (especially the init system and administrative tooling, but the desktops too).

To think that my computers actually worked great under KDE 3 and SysVInit and they do all sorts of crazy shit in the wake of what came about later makes me tend to think that good people have left and in many cases less qualifies people have taken their place.

This is just my general observation as a user. The trajectory has been “on a steep downward spiral” for years.

I’m far too lazy to “learn BSD” or something, and even if I wasn’t, I’m fully aware of the level of, well, outright harassment is going on with things like Wayland and SystemD, against anything that is not Linux, so bad interfaces make it over there as ports and we’ll end up with the same problems, most likely, as they do.

Someone asked what I get with Wayland that I don’t get with X11. Well, nothing. KDE still works great with X11. It took this long to work….at all with Wayland, and in many cases it was just a lot of waiting (on the part of users) and effort (on the part of developers) to get back to some semblance of the order we had prior to this mess.

But in the end, it’s KDE’s circus and KDE’s monkeys, and if they want to spend a lot of time reinventing wheels as part of the Wayland crowd, well, I can’t tell them not to.

They’re apparently going to add a SystemD Blue Screen of Death module. In 2007, I don’t feel that my computers crashed enough to need anything like this.

Modern software development is just make a pile of bugs, then don’t fix it, and go replace something else with a pile of bugs. We’re finally reaping the endgame here, and I’ve got to say that, last night felt like something that would have been more expected under Windows 10 or 11 after some updates roll in than “typical for Linux”.

Very unnerving.

Latest Round of Xorg Vulnerabilities Added Recently and Some Don’t Work Without SELinux Turned On.

Latest Round of Xorg Vulnerabilities Added Recently and Some Don’t Work Without SELinux Turned On.

The latest round of Xorg (X11) vulnerabilities to be patched were added within the last several years.

Out of half a dozen, the oldest ones were added in 2006, but many in 2011, 2012, or 2014.

Many of the defects might have been added by Red Hat employees.

They don’t specify which revision added them, only the release, however, Red Hat likes to complain that they’ve had most of the maintenance burden of Xorg “for years now” whenever the topic of Wayland, which doesn’t really work productively, comes up and they have to read the “Xorg is a mess and we have to do something and this is something” spiel.

This is the company that tells us we need to use Wayland, and which is mainly responsible for Wayland, which breaks everything and makes my computer impossible to use productively until I run the X11 session.

Honestly, Wayland is so f***ed that it causes more graphical glitching, session crashes, and power management issues and other annoyances than X11, which were supposedly the list of reasons X11 had to go, plus it also has no concept of screen savers, so I can’t use XScreenSaver with it. I’ve written a lot about why Wayland is in no sense of the word ready.

Jamie Zawinski said he no longer maintains XScreenSaver for the practical reasons we used to use screen savers for (to prevent burn in, although LCD/LED panels can still burn in).

For years now, the “Environmental Protection Agency” (Employment Prevention Agency) has been a party-pooper requiring the screen to turn off regardless of what the user wanted, because we need MOAR POWER to charge Teslas which won’t charge when it’s cold outside, or something. Or to “SAVE THE PLANET!” because of the sheer arrogance that the people responsible for overpopulation and environmental destruction are going to save it if the computer uses three less watts.

I think the real policy issue with IBM/RH’s war on screen savers is that a world dominated by mega-corporations has no use for art, or a well-educated public, or people who can think for themselves to any meaningful degree.

I don’t even have bizarre hardware, and Wayland is a big shitpile. Intel was promoting Wayland heavily and it doesn’t even work quite right on Intel’s graphics chipsets.

The only thing Wayland accomplished (Mission Accomplished) was stop and make everyone reinvent the wheel to the point of not getting much else done, just so that their software would do what it already did, with implementation gaps that are “not in scope” and reimplementing the same feature in different code (with different quirks) depending on which compositing manager your desktop environment runs in.

Two of the security vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-0409: SELinux context corruption and CVE-2024-0408: SELinux unlabeled GLX PBuffer) don’t work at all unless the user is running with SELinux turned on, which Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux do.

SELinux is such an ungainly mess that it’s hardly possible to understand, and Fedora bumps the selinux-policy all the time because it’s still managing to cause a lot of trouble even more than two decades in.

Now it is actually adding security problems through the “security” policy for the X Server.

A while back, SELinux was patched to remove references to the United States National Security Agency, which originally wrote it. The Agency likes to spy on the entire world and “accidentally” bulk collect data about Americans, or “incidentally” collect it, and then look at the data, with only a secret court that basically only ever says yes to them supervising it.

Stephen Smalley updated his email address and "debranded" SELinux from "NSA SELinux" to simply "SELinux".  We've come a long way from the original NSA submission and I would consider SELinux a true community project at this point so removing the NSA branding just makes sense.

-Linux Kernel Mailing List

Ah yes, which community would that be? The Intelligence Community? IBM/Red Hat? Those are really the only people who have a lot of interest in SELinux. Most non-RH distributions don’t even have it or don’t even have any sort of “security modules” loaded by default, or use AppArmor.

I haven’t seen any evidence that there are major security problems that SELinux is saving real people from. It ticks a box, and in this case, it managed to make Xorg even worse just by being turned on. If IBM/RH cared about security, they wouldn’t be telling people to use RH in Microsoft Azure and AWS where the data breaches keep happening.

I’m just not sure this monthly panic about Xorg bugs is “organic”. Actually, it’s getting pretty Groundhog Day-ish.

I mean, the issues are being fixed. Lots of software has an old and complicated codebase that is difficult to understand and the source of constant bugs.

Also, some of the prior hysteria pointed out that some dated back into the 1980s and 1990s. (Windows routinely has security vulnerabilities this old and no big deal is usually made about them.)

By this example, we should delete Mozilla Firefox and even Linux itself because they too tick all those requirements for not being “secure”, or “modern” or something.

“Secure” and “Modern” are increasingly marketing buzz words, which translate to “Heinously bloated” and “under the control of someone else”, counter-respectively.

Typically, when someone starts throwing those words around to the point of abuse, I just start tuning out.

As always, patch your software. Nothing to see here.

X11 Security Updates for Debian 12.

I just got the X11 security updates for CVEs that were recently patched.

“Microsoft Larabel” over at “Moronix” (Phoronix), has been a foaming-at-the-mouth promoter of IBM Wayland ever since 2008 when the idea was announced.

Since Wayland still has at least 50 major problems when KDE 5.27.x LTS runs on it, I can’t switch from X11 right now, and that’s fine with me.

I’ve blogged before, huge blog posts, about how much I despise Wayland. It’s nothing but trouble even under GNOME, which has the most support for it.

(It causes X11 applications, including Windows programs in Wine, to have serious problems up to and including crashing, but usually just performing worse. X11 applications are still the overwhelming majority.)

Promoting something that’s both problematic and unfinished after 15 years and so badly specced out that common use cases are missing and everyone who points it out gets personal invective insults and FUD coming from a general IBM direction, is unacceptable.

Fortunately, the Xorg Server still works fine.

But, Microsoft Larabel and others went off the rail exaggerating the relevance of some recent security flaws.

Alan Coopersmith of Oracle fixed these flaws quickly, and rather well (he patched the X Server to not take corrupt input like that and do something with it anymore, and also the component that was sending the corrupt input so that it wouldn’t do that), and Debian pushed out the updated components today. I installed them immediately and rebooted my laptop.

There’s no way to secure any software that does anything non-trivial. There’s just not. Even this Rust nonsense has had a lot of emergency updates that have broken things.

If you like rewriting your software constantly because they didn’t standardize on anything, make promises, and make sure it worked before the specification was frozen, then Rust is for you. Unfortunately, this is “modern”.

X11 goes back nearly 40 years and is therefore “not modern”.

That’s a problem to these people. Actually supporting something (including the mistakes) and just fixing what’s actually impossible to live with, is “bad”.

That’s their attitude towards everything from programming languages like Rust and Python (which are horrible….people are STILL trying to move from Python 2 even though it’s been unsupported for years….it just adds negative work when they break things), to glibc (Hello DT_GNU_HASH! Let’s just drop DT_HASH with no warning even though they could live together for a while with a notice to developers!), to Wayland.

Why support something when you can just break it all the time and force everyone into this “It’s IBM’s world and you just live in it.” concept?

Rational person that I am, I hail from a time when people were just crazy and wanted their computer to work, so I installed the security updates and now I’m running the improved version of the software that can’t be attacked with those bugs anymore.

They act like Xorg only needs security updates, like all software does, because it’s old.

I wonder what the position on Web browsers, like Chrome and Firefox, where every update is an emergency and every emergency update, monthly, rolls at least 20 CVEs.

By far, the most dangerous application on your computer, is the Web browser you’re reading this in right now. Nobody wants to make that better. Everyone is making that big shitpile higher. Yet, security posers, including Matthew Garrett say that the Web browser is by far the safest way to run “untrusted code”. It’s actually not.

The safest way to run untrusted code is to not run untrusted code. For the most part, I don’t even run JavaScript if there’s any possible way to avoid doing it. Much less WebMs and WebGL, and all of this other garbage they’re dumping on us that’s full of bugs and can never, ever, be made secure.

Unfortunately, the enemies of Free Software throw around the word “trust” and use it wrongly, use it in bogus ways, corrupt the very meaning of the word, intentionally, to promote Microsoft locking down your computer to impose DRM and trap you on Windows.

Trusted code is an application I can verify the authenticity of, from my Linux distribution’s repo or another verified source, and we’ve had the ability to run this code on Linux distributions for decades now. Windows, which “Secure Boot” is designed to trap people on, doesn’t even do this. Get a file from some random site that’s loaded with spyware, and play the “anti-virus guessing game”.

Being trapped on an OS with no concept of security, that was basically designed like this and can’t be fixed without making the OS so terrible that nobody would want to use it (Windows “S Mode”), is not a solution.

Maybe if Web browsers from Google and Mozilla were just a dumb window server from 1984 instead of Google and Mozilla shitting all over the Internet and turning it into Orwell’s 1984, things would get better on the Web browser front.

If your argument is that a lot of these bugs go back to 1988 or 1998, yeah they do.

If this is your argument, then you should try Windows sometime. Tavis Ormandy alone keeps identifying CVEs that go back into the early 90s Windows NT releases and are still in Windows 10 and 11.

There’s a lot of old rotting code in Windows like this, and Microsoft frequently doesn’t act on private reports, for over a year, and then scrambles after the security researchers publicly out them, and then complain about how unfair it is to put them on the spot like that. As if they had been blindsided and not given months or a year to fix it.

Again, tell me how X11 is somehow special. Find a bug, squash a bug, apply the update.

Same as any other software.

Reasons Why Debian 12 KDE Should Not Default to Wayland. More Flatpak Observations. (Hiding Proprietary Software)

Reasons Why Debian 12 KDE Should Not Default to Wayland

I have been using Debian 12 with KDE for a couple of days and decided to give Wayland another chance since they made it the default session for Plasma.

I ran into troubles with it on openSUSE Leap 15.5 with KDE and switched to Plasma on X11 (Xorg) to make the problems stop.

Here’s what Plasma on Wayland suffers from in Debian 12 KDE.

On first login you get messages that ibus and fcitx don’t work with Wayland. The message only happens once, but the ibus program runs even though it doesn’t work.

This appears to cause applications to sometimes refuse to accept input from the keyboard until you restart the program.

(Also, probably inconvenient for people who use non-Latin alphabets for their native language.)

The Plasma shell randomly crashes. Seems like maybe once every 7-8 hours. It comes right back up without any programs dying, but my….how very Windows of them.

X11 programs (including Windows applications in Wine) look weird when scaled by the system in Wayland, but also don’t scale themselves correctly if you use that option, so you end up with really tiny GUI widgets or really smudgy text. Your choice.

To fix all of this, log out and select “Plasma on X11” and log back in.

Wayland simply isn’t ready and it isn’t clear it ever will be.

My opinion of it has not improved.

It still strikes me as beta software that has now become the default in Long Term Support distributions and, of course, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Brought to you by the IBM, GNOME, GTK people who close bug reports with:

“You need to justify your use case.” Also, *ignores use case*.

“This feature isn’t important enough to most users.”

“That’s broken because something something Security.”

“We are divesting from the Linux desktop to try to get Wayland to work and do things X11 already does. So enjoy us pulling resources away from Bluetooth and GNOME.”

“You’re not being very nice. Being very nice is mandated by the Code of Conduct, unless someone in the Fedora project that’s immune from the CoC says you’re on meth, and crazy, then the CoC doesn’t apply. Also, we’re deleting your bug report comments because you weren’t nice. Nice is a registered trademark of IBM.”

More Flatpak Observations. (Hiding Proprietary Software)

Maybe you’re like me and don’t like seeing proprietary software in your Package Manager or having it made available at all.

It turns out you can force it to show only Free Software in Plasma Discover and on the console! But they did not make it easy and nobody on Flathub seems to have documented this command.

flatpak remote-modify –subset=floss flathub

Technically, the possible values for the subset are “floss” for Free Software, “verified_floss” for Free Software and only Free Software that’s been packaged by the developer themselves, and “verified”, which would list both Proprietary and Free Software, but only if they are packaged by the developer themselves.

It seems like they just don’t want to make it widely known you can do this.

There are so many commands in Flatpak that are undocumented, badly documented, and barely documented, that when I tried this out and logged out and back in, all I could see in Plasma Discover were Free Software Flatpaks, which is what I asked for, but…

How to undo it if you want to?

I was unable to find a specific command. I figured “Delete the flathub repo and install it again.” but was told I couldn’t uninstall it with Flatpaks from Flathub.

When I told it –force, it removed it, then I added the Flathub repo again and waited for it to refresh, and sure enough proprietary software reappeared in my Plasma Discover.

Specifically, the commands I used to remove and reinstall the Flathub remote were:

sudo flatpak remote-delete flathub –force && sudo flatpak remote-add –if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

It seems sort of dumb that there’s no obvious way to reset Flathub to the defaults if you want to short of doing this. Probably, nobody documented the process to put it back because they figure everyone uses GNOME Software anyway.

Literally the only thing that makes this “better” is that there is a toggle to hide and unhide proprietary software from Flathub.

Now I know I’ll look at the license and if it says Proprietary, I’m almost certainly not going to install it, because frankly a lot of it is useless junk that has alternatives with all of the same features anyway.

Like Microsoft Edge is crappy spyware full of garbage, and all of the features that Alan Pope recently praised it for are in Brave anyway, and he just apparently didn’t look at Brave. (Including Vertical Tabs, the Memory Saver).

A lot of the rest of the proprietary garbage are things I could open in a Web browser tab, but they’ve packaged them in Electron (Chromium) as a “desktop” app full of baloney. (And who knows what they’ve put in it?).

It is frightening that Flathub has managed to put almost 600 pieces of proprietary software in there. So maybe you should just give it an enema and not look back.

Having looked it over, I’ll almost certainly just set the subset of “floss” back anyway, I just wanted to make sure “something” would reset it for this blog post.

I don’t like having to stop and read licenses, and Flathub has a lot of good Free Software programs, but it feels like they really want proprietary software in your face by default, and don’t want to document a way out.

According to the bug reports I was reading, this filter wasn’t even an option until maybe a year or a year and a half ago. I guess it’s something they “put out there” to silence critics.

foobar2000 on Wine, Wayland, and GNOME Equals Trouble.

foobar2000 on Wine, Wayland, and GNOME Equals Trouble.

foobar2000 is a popular Windows program for managing audio files.

It can play, organize, but also batch transcode just about anything to just about anything else. You can install the Free Encoder Pack, and if you want to use later binaries for the encoder, you can just grab the Windows x86-64 binary of the official encoder and stomp the .exe that came with foobar2000.

One thing I’ve never liked about Linux transcoding programs, is that while we do have them, authors of software like SoundConverter (which is meant for GNOME and uses GTK) tend to use things like GStreamer, which was not intended to encode and has a rather bogus Opus encoder of its own that I do not like. About the only reliable destination format in SoundConverter is MP3, which uses LAME.

But MP3 is an aging format. It doesn’t do well at 128k and lower VBR bitrates, and it will never do as well as Opus.

foobar2000 is one of the few Windows programs I haven’t given up.

But under GNOME and Wayland, it’s quite unpredictable.

Sometimes it starts up with a black screen and you have to shut down the program and know which database file got corrupt and delete it.

Sometimes you go to drag files from Nautilus (GNOME Files) into foobar2000, and it simply crashes foobar2000.

When I posted my criticisms of Wayland yesterday, I didn’t include this one, simply alluding to the fact that Wayland has problems even with GNOME.

This is one of them. When Wine runs, it runs on XWayland. Something about foobar2000 running on XWayland in GNOME causes these bugs. The author of foobar2000 doesn’t care what happens when you use Wine.

The GNOME, GTK, and Wayland people are all IBM Red Hat types who defame people who report bugs, threaten them with the CoC, and then accuse them of being on meth and cover up their own CoC violations with network bans.

So good luck getting help for this with anyone in that line of people.

But when you run foobar2000 on X11, it works. It doesn’t do this.

This is another case of Wayland causing problems with actual work where no problem actually existed before under X11. And I’m sure that I’m not the only person who ran into something like this, or the problems with Fallout 4.

There’s simply too many problems with Wayland and GNOME to cover up, so the developers resort to trolling and hate speech, and CoC threats against users and developers who come there wanting them to do stuff.

(As you can see, this behavior from Red Hat predates IBM and was toxic, completely unprofessional, and unacceptable even in 2015. If you’re not going to implement a feature, can you at least not attempt to rewrite history and come up with completely disingenuous lies?)

This is why GNOME, GTK, and Wayland should just die already. Die in a fire.

I’ve noticed an awful lot of cases with KDE on X11 in openSUSE Leap where I’m like “How did I tolerate Fedora, GNOME, Wayland, and the rest of this forever?”

I wouldn’t mind it if they would just say “You’re not paying us and this isn’t a problem for us, so we don’t care.” but they troll you. They make you feel guilty for even asking questions. They say things like “If you don’t like Fedora, just get a refund for the money you paid!”.

This is juvenile and it’s exactly the difficult personality types new users would run into 20 years ago and decide that maybe Linux just wasn’t for them.

It’s sad to see that this is a problem 20 years later, and the problem is mostly in GNOME, and distributions are even still shipping GNOME despite the toxicity from the developer side.

The Code of Conduct isn’t there to protect people from corporate hostility, gaslighting, hate speech, and troll squads. It’s there to muzzle people who came to make very reasonable requests.

X11 was pretty much defined, written, hashed out, and developed in the time before the Red Hat “Good Old Boys” club came about. It’s hard to hijack it, rewrite history, and flame people who use it.

Since I haven’t seen any indicators that Wine will work on Wayland natively soon, there’s nothing for me to even experiment with now.

Maybe that’s why it tends to work and “needs replaced”.

I’d say that a lot of the attitude of Red Hat just goes back to the roots of the company and hasn’t gotten any better or less toxic under IBM.

In fact, their refusal to prioritize the desktop experience was basically the only reason Mandrake Linux came about. They were ahead of their time in having a desktop-oriented Linux distribution that had an easy installer and a partitioning tool that made sense, and when you installed it you were greeted by help wizards and documentation and KDE at a time when Red Hat Linux was pretty rough stuff.

Now they admit that they’re not particularly worried about the Corporate Desktop anymore and don’t think that business software even matters.

They deleted their mailing list so that it’s not easy to track the orphaned Fedora packages anymore or watch discussions about it.

I’d say that you should use the time while Fedora is even supported at all to develop a migration strategy to something else. Like I did.

Will Wayland Even Survive the Collapse of IBM? X11 Likely Will.

One of IBM’s stated reasons for pulling investments in actually important Linux software is they need to focus on Wayland.

I recently read on the mailing list, one of the Wayland developers basically admitting that they break the APIs and ABI all the time and usually don’t even get much “mileage”, so to speak, out of doing it. This shows, to me, that they rushed it out the door way before it was ready.

Developers tend to have noticed this. However, IBM doesn’t care. Their goal is to throw their weight around and make everyone use Wayland, even though it’s horribly broken.

All of the hideous things that X11 does were either fixed by extensions and patching over the last 39 years or don’t really matter much anymore.

In some cases, complaints about how X11 does things that “justified” starting over don’t even happen anymore.

For example, one of the Wayland developers (in an article that propagated to Phoronix) used an example of Flash and Java being subwindows of the Web browser.

Well, NPAPI (and Chrome’s version, PPAPI) is dead.

For better or worse, everything that an NPAPI (PPAPI) plug-in did is handled by the browser and the browser window now, so we no longer run into this problem in the window that IBM Red Hat says is the only one on your screen that matters.

(Because downloading an entire office program into your browser, which needs networking and someone else’s permission to continue running, is cool and modern.)

It dawned on me that while I was trying to get Fallout 4 working (in my recent post), almost all of the serious issues with the game that weren’t just some package that didn’t come pre-installed on openSUSE were actually Wayland problems, and not just Wayland problems, XWayland problems.

XWayland has its own special problems while running on Wayland that don’t happen when you just run your window manager on X11 directly.

Is X11 old? Sure. Does it matter much? Not if you ask me, as a user.

I would much rather have SeaMonkey and other X11 applications show up clean, crisp, clear, and scaled right, than smudgy and vaguely reminiscent of “Microsoft Glaucoma-vision”, which is what I refer to as the way Windows 10 and 11 scale things incorrectly and then put “Vaseline on the fonts”. This is just shoddy craftsmanship.

If you can believe this shit, Microsoft actually patented that (since expired), and called it a feature. It looked like the original edit of Star Wars where Luke Skywalker was hovering around on his speeder on Tatooine and George Lucas said they hid the wheels under it by smearing a blob of Vaseline on the camera lens.

Wine, which is a very important program to me, runs Windows programs. It uses X11.

When it runs on XWayland it picks up lag and stability problems and passes them along to the Windows programs and games I want to run.

When I double-click on Fallout or something, I want my game to run. Not skip frames and then jitter and die because XWayland doesn’t work properly, STILL.

One of the reasons I give to Windows users for why they should switch to Linux is that I’ve had really good luck with Wine. Wine is still not ported over to use Wayland and it’s not clear when or if it will ever be.

The openSUSE project avoided so much drama, so many difficult people, and so much political nonsense and technical problems by remaining with KDE and bothering to ship a version of it you can use.

One of the reasons IBM Red Hat dropped KDE entirely is that they were hoping to inflict a mortal wound, the same reason IBM supported defamation of an elderly man (Richard Stallman, who is 70.) and then stopped paying for GNU software development, but they still “freeload” off it.

Roy Schestowitz tells me he’s rarely seen IBM hiring Germans who have worked on KDE.

That’s fine by me if it’s true. That just means that we won’t have the most competent people going to work for IBM, being told to do dumb pointless redundant broken shit with GNOME and Wayland, and hiding under a desk when the Pointy Hair Boss goes by laying people off.

If Wayland still isn’t working right after 15 years, if it still behaves like some bugged, crummy, perpetual beta software, when will it work right?

I’m actually amused that IBM Red Hat considers it so production ready that it’s been in “Enterprise Linux” for a while.

Sure, as a user of an Enterprise Linux clone (or RHEL), you could fight your way like a salmon swimming upstream, using the last of its energy and time on Earth to lay eggs and die, fixing all of the really terrible engineering decisions IBM has made for you.

Some of the clones support BtrFS and DTrace (Oracle), and I think KDE is available as unofficial packages, but I think the Enterprise Desktop really deserves better software, and the developers of openSUSE realize that moving crackpot shit like Wayland over to a stable Linux distro just turns it into “Fedora with older packages”.

Some distributions, especially Red Hat, have this odd sort of definition of stability.

This definition means the software might be full of bugs, it might glitch, but at least it doesn’t change much. To those ends, IBM even ignores security patches.

And I guess I can see why you would shove Wayland in a desktop on an enterprise distro, when soon after, you divest from desktop work anyway.

It can load Firefox. It’s perfect. Firefox loads Office 365. Firefox and Office 365 are the only two things people should want to use.

What? You want to run software? On your computer? Oh…

It’s true that maybe in some tortured way, years from now, it will replace most of what X11 can do and, maybe someday Wine will work properly with XWayland. But it’s still not now.

Even on Fedora with GNOME I was still running into Wayland problems.

I wouldn’t be surprised if X11 outlives Fedora, RHEL, IBM, and on into the next century.

It’s become a fixture, like an old refrigerator that never breaks down.

KWin running so reliably on X11, mostly at parity with all of the redundant work just needed to get it working at all on Wayland (except that the Wayland version of the code isn’t quite stable), sort of proves that this has all been rather something of a misadventure of negative work that’s gone on for years.

IBM has been throwing out a lot of FUD about X11 being “abandoned”, but the mailing lists tell a story of something that still gets a lot of development attention considering that it’s 39 years old and feature complete, in ways that would only matter if you’re actually running it, and not just XWayland.

Even the Direct Rendering Infrastructure and DDX stuff for some video cards from the 90s just got updates last month. And that goes out pretty far from the core code.

As Free Software, X11 can live as long as it’s still useful. Nobody can “take it away” or force you to stop using it.

Finally…

Security! Everyone’s favorite refuge for when they’ve lost all their other arguments.

Sure Wayland can stop applications from reading input events from the other ones.

At least in theory, it can. Everything can be broken. There’s always bugs.

However, I just simply don’t care. This isn’t Windows (where applications can literally just dump dlls into each other and load malware into Firefox, for example).

I don’t have “Linux malware” because I haven’t installed any.

So to me, this “reason” to have Wayland is another fallacious argument.

This same “security feature” is one of the reasons why people have to fall back to X11 to make legitimate software work. So adding “security” that breaks too many real legitimate things is what Linus Torvalds (before they made him go to “therapy” he didn’t need”) called “Masturbating Monkeys”.

It’s up there with “Secure Boot” and “attestations”.

But that’s a whole different story.

I Managed to Make Fallout 4 Work in openSUSE Leap.

Ugh, this again.

So, openSUSE Leap 15.5 being an enterprise-like system with slow moving releases, it’s been something of a chore to set up for a laptop, especially one where I occasionally want to play Windows games.

Even after installing the vulkan packages and Wine Stable 8.0, and the media codecs from the “Packman” repository with “opi”, when I launched Fallout 4 Game of the Year Edition this time, I ended up with no voices and no soundtracks.

When I ran it with wine Fallout4.exe, it complained that it could not find a Windows Media Audio codec for gstreamer.

This seemed an awful lot like the problem I ran into with Debian 11 in 2021 where Microsoft just bumps old games for no reason except to harass Wine and Steam Play users with new Windows 10 APIs that do something that already existed, only worse and differently. Pointless APIs. Garbage that needs WMA when the thing just opened and played MP3 files before! But…….with the added bonus that the game would run for a minute or two then crash to the desktop after lagging a bit.

When I got to looking into it, I noticed that openSUSE Leap also didn’t have the faudio packages installed, but that didn’t fix it either. So I tried installing libavcodec56, nope.

Eventually installing libavformat56 and libavformat57 got the sound working, but still crashes.

After a while, I found that it works better on KDE on X11. In fact, KWin in general feels faster and more responsive under X11.

So, possibly XWayland issues? Older versions of stuff than Fedora had? Who cares, I just want my game to work.

Eventually KDE will solve enough of these Wayland issues that I can go ahead and start using that session. It seems they’re pretty close already. Probably by Plasma 6, it’ll be production-machine worthy.

Eventually, after turning off antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, textures to high, resolution at 1920×1080, and “God Rays off” whatever those are, those seem to make it crash in Wine too, it worked.

I installed vkd3d (the Direct3D to Vulkan stuff). I don’t know if this build of Wine uses them. It only works with Direct3D 12 in any event. Which most Windows games I’m interested in don’t even need.

I also realized that the screen will dim and turn off and the screen lock will come on, so I disabled all of these in Power Management and Workspace Behavior/Screen Locking.

While I’m gaming, the thing is obviously plugged in, so I just left power management for when it’s on battery.

I’ve had a lot more luck, obviously, with Linux native games, and retro gaming, than getting Windows garbage to work in Wine.

Bethesda games were crap code before Microsoft got in and started re-arranging it all and making it depend on newer APIs.

This is the company that already broke their games more with patches than when they shipped. In Skyrim, they had a patch that made the dragons fly backwards.

I don’t think it’s fair to pin the blame on these binaries on Wine as they’ve always been real “SPECIAL”. 😉