I've not had breaking changes in Linux for a long, long time. I generally use either a completely unmodified, default config Gnome, or Sway with my own config.

I've used a couple of different desktop environments or window managers over the past few decades, but these days I either stick with the default (which is so often Gnome) or use Sway, where I can just copy in my config file and everything works exactly as I'm used to.

> If you have the time to “play” with it Linux is amazing. But you have to defend yourself against upgrades.

That has not been my experience. If you are using something like Arch (rolling release distro) maybe, but Ubuntu and Debian stable have been pretty much that.

I also find it a little funny that a complaint about Linux is in the thread of a post showing how Apple will change things that break their users without apology.

I’ve found that even if I have time to allot to playing with Linux, I can never get things tuned the way I want. If you want bog standard Win9X paradigm desktop (most DEs), iPadOS with a mild desktop bent (GNOME), or yet another minimal tiling WM those are easy to do, but reproducing other environments (mainly macOS) keeping all the bits that matter in tact isn’t currently possible. It’s quite frustrating for me.

If it weren’t for the fact that such a thing would progress glacially if worked on only in my spare time I’d write my own DE and maintain enough forks that my GitHub profile would look like a fork factory.

Making a simple tweak like setting caps lock to an extra ctrl is a whole side quest on Linux and you may never really get it working everywhere.

Part of the fun with that is there's about fifty different places you could do it, and the only one that will really affect everything is in the kernel (IIRC), anything else will affect the program, window manager, terminal, etc but not necessarily anything else. And some programs bypass everything and read scancodes anyway.

Whereas in Mac OS X it's a simple configurable option (a bit hidden, System Settings, Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Modifier Keys).

And if you do it in the kernel, then any other users on the machine are stuck with your choice. The MacOS setting is per-user, but affects very nearly everything, except the recovery environment and I guess the login screen, for good reasons.

It makes me wonder, how exactly would one go about implementing Linux remapping that works on everything on a per-user basis? Is there a way to hook into the USB HID implementation and change what it reports to X, Wayland, etc and flip it on/off based on user preferences?

You'd likely need to have the kernel be able to switch "keymaps" at anytime (and this is likely to be privileged and need to be done by root).

I know there was a way to load different keyboard layouts, but the problem with those mechanisms is they often cannot remap modifier keys, of which capslock is a special case of.

> Making a simple tweak like setting caps lock to an extra ctrl is a whole side quest on Linux

I've remapped CapsLock to Esc on both macOS and Linux/GNOME. It's just a checkbox/combobox in a settings in both cases. What is 'a whole side quest' you are talking about?

It is funny because this is actually one of the main things I like about Linux. My current setup is basically the same as the one I had 20 years ago. Things function and look the same. The only difference is that it the background lots of improvements started accumulating not to mention my much better PC.

With Linux it feels I can keep doing the things how I want them to do. True, there are some distributions and window managers that throw the baby out with the bathwater for every update, looking at Ubuntu and Gnome, but sticking to something more conservative and you are set for live. Also, every time this happens, somebody will always fork of the old code, like with Mate and Trinity.

With a Mac or Windows you are sort of stuck with wills and whims of some company. If Windows could still look and function like 2000, but just be better, I might still use it to this day.

> With a Mac or Windows you are sort of stuck with wills and whims of some company.

It's true, but I'd also say macOS as it is today looks pretty damn similar to screenshots of the first OSX version shown off 20+ years ago. Other than updated icons (which are still mostly based off the original icons) and an overall flatter aesthetic compared to the flashy, novel 3D of those days, it mostly functions the same. They only updated the Preferences app to System Settings in the last version with a design overhaul, and it was a pretty big deal because they don't do that much.

People will (and have) showed up to deny this, but what you describe is common enough that it can't be untrue.

At this very moment, I'm still going through the "play" phase. If you pick a distro and then never change anything about it, then maybe it will work out for you out of the box. But as soon as you try to "make it yours", suddenly you'll find yourself with a second day job with no pay, you'll wonder where all your free time went, and your muscle tone will be gone. Inevitably, you'll have some weird issue like a particular program acting slow and causing the mouse to lag, or maybe your Wayland compositor has the wrong cursor position, and nobody on the internet knows why, except for some guy with a script as long as the declaration of independence that you can run in your terminal to fix all your problems (um, no). Eventually you give up and run the built-in compositor within another compositor, and somehow that fixes the original issue. But now your keyboard/mouse configuration no longer works! Holy shit, it's almost Christmas? Screw this, let's install Debian stable. Wait, what? The installer can't find the installation media? You ARE the installation media! Fuuuuuuuuu...

I love Linux as a tool, but the desktop experience will never get its act together. Whether it works for you or not seems to be based on luck. I don't even want a complicated desktop experience; I just want something basic like Openbox and a web browser, but these days you can barely even do that without a bunch of tinkering (unless you want to stick entirely to X11).

It seems like the problem that makes it common is that Linux self-selects for people who want to tinker (that's why they're installing a non-default OS). The difference is that it also accommodates people who reach a point where they just want the computer to work and get out of their way. So you end up hearing both voices.

> If you pick a distro and then never change anything about it, then maybe it will work out for you out of the box.

Yes, exactly. Use a stable distro, don't touch things, and they won't change. It will continue to run exactly the same for years and years. This is in contrast to OSX and Windows. Windows is completely unrecognizable to me since stopped using it 7-8 years ago (the last version I used being Windows 7). My Linux desktop works exactly the same (with Firefox as an outlier that randomly removes/hides functionality). Apple is notorious for not caring about backwards compatibility, and just expecting everyone to accommodate whatever changes they want to make.

> unless you want to stick entirely to X11

Right, don't change things, and it will keep working. Wayland sounds like its benefits are all nerd stuff that I don't care about (a "better" architecture or whatever). Meanwhile, X works just fine. At some point, if people stop complaining about Wayland, and if it has some benefit to me, maybe I'll try it. Currently it seems that neither of those criteria are met. When I do try it, if it doesn't work, I'll just roll it back.

Another part of the problem (for me) is I would get something like an LTS setup the way I want (a CentOS or an Ubuntu LTS, but I honestly can't recall exactly what I was running on my desktop at the time) and it would be rock solid for years - until it finally was old enough (or out of support) and I wanted to install something new and I had to upgrade - and which point I get five years of changes right to the face, and spend a week or more tinkering everything to how I wanted it.

>Yes, exactly. Use a stable distro, don't touch things, and they won't change. It will continue to run exactly the same for years and years. This is in contrast to OSX and Windows. Windows is completely unrecognizable to me since stopped using it 7-8 years ago (the last version I used being Windows 7).

Unless you're willing to use Flatpak though, you'll be stuck with old versions of applications because user applications in the Linux world are typically tightly coupled to the system packages.

Right but that's the point. I'm fine with my stuff being out of date. I'm not trying to tinker. I don't need to use the latest versions of things because the current ones work fine. If there were something new I really wanted, then I can use one of those containerized versions until it lands in my distro's stable channel, which is every 6 months or so for feature releases.

> Wayland sounds like its benefits are all nerd stuff that I don't care about (a "better" architecture or whatever).

Kind of.

If you have a Retina display, for instance, Wayland is superior out of the box. Unless an application is written all stupid, it has a good chance of rendering at the correct scale while looking crisp. It's possible to do this with X11 or Xwayland, but I found it requires more tweaking of individual app settings and GTK environment variable to get it to look right. But even then, try using both X11 and Wayland apps together and get both kinds to look right on your HiDPI display without one or the other looking fuzzy or incorrectly scaled. I found it virtually impossible, thus it's better to just go with either one or the other. Although I think it would have been better to actually fix X11, Wayland does actually do most things better. HiDPI is one of them, and the other is vsync. I haven't seen Wayland cause horizontal tearing, but X11 always gave me this issue. A popular Stack Exchange question titled "Why is video tearing such a problem on Linux?" was written by me as a result of having tried my best to get my Linux installations to not experience horizontal tearing but inevitably failed no matter what display or graphics card I was using. I'm glad that someone in the Linux sphere decided to take vsync seriously and make it a non-issue with Wayland.

The average person doesn't need to know about Wayland, especially if they are going with a Wayland-based distro and not changing anything about it.

The only reason one would need to know about it, besides if they are writing a compositor, is if they are trying to customize their Linux distribution. In that case, they may be in for a world of hurt, because it may not be so easy as to install all the Linux apps they know and love and have everything look and play nice.

That's I think what gets to people like me. Linux is great for the server and containers, but as far as the desktop goes, it's still trying to figure out what it wants to be all these decades later. The idea that you can make it anything you want is true more in principal than in practice. Luckily, I think I have found my happy place with my customized version of Debian that I'm rolling for my own personal use, but that was after countless hours of trying things until they worked. If I wasn't willing to put in that effort and risk having nothing to show for it, I'd have dismissed Linux as a joke and just used macOS everywhere instead.

I suppose I occasionally notice a tear, but I can't say it's ever affected usability. I'm the type to turn off all animations though, so maybe that has something to do with it. I also use a cheapo $300 4k 32" monitor, and things seem to be fine at 100% scaling with a 10 pt font. If I had a $5000 monitor, I could see wanting to make it work. I also sit a little over 2 ft back from my monitor though, so the angular pixel resolution is still over 60 pixels per degree, so I don't see much point in going higher resolution than 4k.

I have read that HDR support will likely come to Wayland first (if it ever comes to X). That may be a compelling reason to try it out. Hopefully by then some of the kinks are worked out.

Back when I cared more, I was working with a lot of fast motion stuff in software like Maya, Nuke, etc., so the tearing was really bad and distracting.

> I have read that HDR support will likely come to Wayland first (if it ever comes to X). That may be a compelling reason to try it out. Hopefully by then some of the kinks are worked out.

As a side note, it's kinda crazy to me that we're talking about HDR "coming" in 2023; my graphics design teacher was telling us about HDR in 2009.

> But as soon as you try to "make it yours", suddenly you'll find yourself with a second day job with no pay, you'll wonder where all your free time went, and your muscle tone will be gone.

It's true for every OS. I went Windows -> Linux -> MacOS and I had to get used to every time.

This sorta feels like a parody comment, especially as I currently sit at my work macbook with an entirely redesigned and laid out settings UI (which now actually reminds me of the control panel view from windows XP - with it's new list of categories with lots of confusing, duplicate, and overlapping choices).