Exactly what they’re doing right now. What cable companies did. What every dominant business does when something better starts to eat their lunch.

Become increasingly abusive and scummy towards the customers who are left, because they’re either too deeply ingrained, spineless or lazy to change and they’ve already self-selected.

I’m afraid I have to disagree with you on this premise.

There are lots of things you can get by in life without knowledge of. If you don’t know how vaccines work, you can go right on through your life and argue that you have better things to do… until we reach a critical mass of people who are willfully ignorant and the next thing you know we have a head of health and human services who thinks eating random dead animals is a safe way to boost your immune system making decisions.

Large-scale, pervasive ignorance of things that are actually critical and consequential to the functioning of society is not without consequence. It’s a free world and people are free to take the view that they don’t care. They’re also free to completely forgo and not use technology. But both using it in your daily life AND deciding it isn’t important to know any basic knowledge about how it works? I’m not concerning myself with those people - I don’t understand OR respect their decision.

I am very understanding of “it’s too difficult, make it easier”. I am NOT understanding or accommodating of “I don’t think I should have to do it at all.”

Edit: Furthermore, we wouldn’t even be HAVING this conversation if those people really believed that produced good enough results. Most operating systems are ALREADY built with that philosophy. If Windows and other operating systems that are built based around the philosophy that you don’t need to understand anything and the OS should do everything for you was working so well, why are people looking at Linux in the first place? It’s pretty clear that that philosophy is not producing satisfactory results anymore. I would argue it CAN’T produce satisfactory results. You either want control and freedom, and the responsibility and extra work that comes along with that, or you don’t. There’s no free ride that gets you both.

The premise of the question is that it’s somehow supposed to be a flawless experience.

Nothing is flawless. Linux has a learning curve. Everything does.

The advantage to Linux is, if you learned Linux 15 years ago, then got stranded on a desert island, got rescued, and installed a new distro today, you can still count on more or less everything working exactly as you expect it to - maybe a bit smoother.

With Windows, who knows? It’s death from a thousand tiny cuts every other day to avoid a deeper, persistent, and meaningful understanding of your system. The time you spend learning how to do things in Linux isn’t WASTED. That knowledge will never STOP being useful. It’s best not to look at it as an annoyance so much as an INVESTMENT.

I mean, I would argue it’s better than standard tech support because I don’t get disconnected and it sometimes actually solves a problem

I appreciate the information, and I’m willing to give it a shot again when I next need to do a distro switch or a new installation, but until now my experiences with Wayland have basically been a stream of broken things over several days as I try to reestablish my workflow in a new desktop environment. The time it all goes successfully is the time I’ll be sold.

Like I said, I use Linux in my classroom, and I heavily use global shortcut keys set via script for individual lessons, with fullscreen opening of applications that don’t have automatic support and shortcut key based window switching all without mouse input to create a seamless presentation for my students.

Global shortcuts and wmctrl, which form the critical backbones of this system, simply don’t work in Wayland.

And to suggest it’s just a perfect transition is wrong. I don’t use Steam Link, but if I did? Doesn’t work in Wayland. Everyone constantly bemoans that applications should be rewritten for Wayland, but one of Linux’s advantages is eternal backwards compatibility so software can actually be FINISHED.

Wayland isn’t the kernel and it shouldn’t be held to the standard of the Linux kernel, but do you remember when Linus Torvalds publicly screamed at and berated a developer for a change to the kernel that broke a userspace application and then having the sheer GALL to suggest the application developer was at fault? Wayland evangelists could stand to be a little more understanding that people don’t like it when you break functional userspace applications, force developers to work on stuff that is FINISHED to get it working again, and then blame them for not getting on board with your changes. You know who does that? Google.

Look, Wayland works for you and that’s fantastic. Use whatever you like. Linux is Linux and one of the most beautiful points of Linux is freedom of choice. What I take exception to is the people in this thread who are acting like anybody who isn’t on Wayland is crazy and insisting there’s no good reason to still be on X11 just because they personally don’t understand why someone would need features they need. Anyone expounding that “Wayland is a 1 to 1 replacement for X11 and superior in every way!” is either being intentionally disingenous or a cultist. You know who insists users are wrong for having their own use cases and workflow and wants them to change to their preferred system because THEY don’t think the other use cases matter? Microsoft.

I’ll be happy to make the switch to Wayland… when I do a system install or update and it happens invisibly and I don’t suddenly have to wonder why all of my custom scripts no longer work.

It’s not that I have issues - it works just fine in the domain it’s designed for. It’s that the Wayland system does not provide feature parity with X11. I make extensive use of window manipulation using xdotool and wmctrl for my daily use case, and those are both unsupported on Wayland. It’s a fine system for users whose use case fit with its design. It is not a feature complete replacement for X11.

I’ll never make the claim that X11 is perfect, but my use case requires features that are either not built into Wayland yet or simply won’t be built into it in the future.

I’m sure it’s a fine product, but asking me to change my workflow to use it is a non-starter. When it reaches feature complete support of X11 functionality, I’ll consider changing.

Just off the top of my head, Linux Mint, which I know because Waydroid is incompatible with the machines I use in my classrooms. Even if it were compatible, unless the lack of global hotkeys has been addressed changing is a non-starter.

That’s a fair point, and it’s the Waydroid team’s unquestioned right to use whatever technologies they want to build their software on.

But just throwing it out as a solution to a general Linux question when there’s a VERY good chance it’s incompatible with major distros is omitting critical information.

It saddens me to see you being downvoted by the Wayland evangelists when it is CLEARLY not a (EDIT: feature complete) replacement for X11 yet. If I could upvote you twice, I would.

Major, MAJOR caveat here.