UnityDevice

Not even, amd on both my laptop and desktop, but still lots of issues. None of them major, but it adds up.

while they happily stick to the X they know

I mean, I’d love to, but…

Gnome forced me onto Wayland a few weeks ago and I’ve been dealing with issues ever since. Some issues even affecting the most basic level tasks like typing text, imagine dealing with that in 2025. Following your analogy, if the Uber with the fancy new transmission came to a halt every kilometre, you’d care too.

Once in a while, it turns out that enabling -fms-extensions could allow some slightly prettier code. But every time it has come up, the code that had to be used instead has been deemed “not too awful” and not worth introducing another compiler flag for.

That’s probably true for each individual case, but then it’s somewhat of a chicken/egg situation.

If we just “bite the bullet” as Linus says and enable it once and for all, it is available whenever a use case turns up, and no individual case has to justify it.

A lore.kernel.org search provides these examples:

• https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/200706301813.58435.agruen@suse.de/
• https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20180419152817.GD25406@bombadil.infradead.org/
• https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/170622208395.21664.2510213291504081000@noble.neil.brown.name/
• https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/87h6475w9q.fsf@prevas.dk/
• https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wjeZwww6Zswn6F_iZTpUihTSNKYppLqj36iQDDhfntuEw@mail.gmail.com/

Undoubtedly, there are more places in the code where this could also be used but where -fms-extensions just didn’t come up in any discussion.

Basically the extensions are useful sometimes. Note that they have nothing to do with Microsoft other than being invented by them.

And xorg is older than it appears, as it was forked from the much older XFree86 over licensing disagreements. XFree86 started in 1991 according to Wikipedia.

I finally had to switch recently because I use gnome, and they removed the X11 session. I managed to sort out most of the missing parts needed for my workflow, but it still feels like a downgrade. It feels much more sluggish, things that were instant now take a second, and I’ve been under a constant barrage of bugs and glitches. Some make the whole experience feel like using amateur software. I’ll be typing, then press a global shortcut to launch some software, and I’ll end up with whole desktop pausing for a second and the shortcut inserted in my text 20 times. And this happens a few times a day. Just one example.

I’ve almost exclusively used Linux desktop for the past decade and it was a smooth experience, but with gnome-wayland I finally understand the people that were always complaining about everything being broken and glitchy.

I can understand having some bugs, but if text or mouse input doesn’t work properly, or if using my new laptop suddenly feels like using my much slower old one, then I may as well look for a different desktop.