Giver of skulls

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Joined 101 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 1923

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  • I mean, you can just run Winamp in Wine already.

    Linux support will depend on how tightly integrated the application is with the Windows API. It may very well be easier to just keep running in Wine, maybe after patching out some Wine related bugs.

    It also depends on the llicense. If they don’t license Winamp and just show off the code, nobody is actually allowed to do anything with it. The title of their announcement uses"source available" so I assume the license is quite restrictive.




  • A lot of valid email addresses are obvious typos. steve@gmail is perfectly valid but useless in most web forms, for instance. A lot of websites drop technical compliance for the convenience of people who don’t know how email works.

    Technical compliance can also become rather annoying when you start doing things like escaping characters in quoted strings or include spaces. Practically nobody is using any of that stuff in the real life, so you rarely ever need full compliance.

    I don’t know why single character email addresses would fail that test, though.




  • Bluesky is growing rapidly while ActivityPub growth is stagnating. I expect BS to grow beyond AP this year. People I used to follow on Mastodon have moved over to Bluesky, so I had to create an account there.

    Personally, I like the ability to follow people who don’t necessarily know how to install Linux. I’m glad techies seem to slowly move towards ActivityPub related services, but the general public doesn’t seem all that interested. Plus, federation between services is the whole point of the fediverse!






  • Wayland is architexturally better than X11. X11 was developed in a time where any serious application more powerfully than a terminal emulator would be running on another computer, and everything else has been hacked on top of that. There’s hardly any security restrictions for things like keyloggers and key stroke injection. It’s old and maintenance sucks for the people currently maintaining it.

    After a couple of decades, people looked at what the rest was doing and thought perhaps the old mainframe model isn’t necessary anymore. Windows and macros don’t model their GUI after mainframes with dumb terminals that happen to be physically located within the same machine, so X stands alone in its design architecture.

    I think everyone maintaining graphics code for Linux distros thinks X11 doesn’t cut it anymore. Importantly, the people writing GPU drivers don’t seem to want to be held back by the extensions built on top of X11 (while others dutifully maintain their old drivers). This is work only the companies making GPUs can afford, without it, the drivers will stop working. There’s probably also a reason Android took the Linux kernel but stripped it of X11 acceleration and developed its own GUI stack. Canonical tried to get rid of X years ago by developing Mir and a bunch of small projects tried to create an X12 of sorts, but neither took off. Almost everyone is now working on Wayland when it comes to alternatives.

    There are people who don’t care. Some GUIs will always be X11 and they can use X11 as long as the drivers and tooling still support it. Most X11 programs have worked without modification for years through XWayland, and I expect future applications to still work fine through some kind of reverse that’ll turn Wayland programs into X11 programs.



  • I doubt it’ll be the end of accessibility. There’s a very active issue on Github about an accessibility portal to fix Wayland’s shortcomings for accessibility. I expect the problem to be that very few people work on accessibility tooling, so even if the standard is finished tomorrow, it can take years for tooling to catch up.

    I expect the Gnome/KDE tools to work on Gnome and KDE first, and then generic tools to work later. Or maybe the tooling Google has built into ChromeOS will be ported over, as Chromebooks are running on Wayland as well, who knows!

    Luckily, X11 is going nowhere for the coming years. There are still people running system-v on bleeding edge Arch installs. Linux has a very long half time when it comes to software support. If you install Ubuntu 24.04 with X11 today, you’ll be able to keep using the current accessibility toolset until 2034 at least.


  • In X11, any application can control any window. That makes screen readers and other accessibility tools very easy to write.

    In Wayland, applications can only control their own stuff (no injecting sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root through keystrokes right after you hit enter on a sudo command in your terminal!). Screen recording access is only granted on request. A lot of applications written for the “anything goes, permissions are an illusion” style X11 has, will be difficult to port to Wayland.

    Windows had a similar problem when Vista introduced integrity levels (even non-admin users can have several levels of privileges, and windows can’t interact with higher privilege levels by default) leading to a lot of these tools running as admin, even under modern Windows.

    Wayland and X11 have a more involved accessibility tree, but not every accessibility application uses that, and not every application exposes the necessary info. Synthetic clicks (i.e. interactive screen reader support) support is limited by design, as are global keyboard shortcuts.

    Accessibility tools on Linux are already pretty mediocre compared to macOS or iOS or Android or Windows, but on Wayland it’s even worse.


  • I’ve never used xmonad but it looks like a generic tiling window manager based on a quick Google. There are tons of those for Wayland, with Sway and Hyprland seemingly leading the charge.

    I don’t think xmonad has the development power or the interest to rewrite their X11 window manager into a Wayland compositor. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any replacements that have been designed from the ground up to work with Wayland, though.


  • Depends on how you measure it. A lot of IoT and wearables run Wayland, for instance (Tizen, Steam Deck, a bunch of specialised IoT stuff). Also don’t forget the millions of Chromebook running Wayland on top of Linux. With my watch, my Deck, and my laptop running Wayland versus my desktop running X11, I live in a Wayland household.

    I’m not sure what the general user is running, I would say X11 as well, mostly because a lot of Linux users have Nvidia hardware and Nvidia’s crapper drivers still struggle with Wayland. I think it’ll be a few years before you could say that the majority of people who know what Linux is, are on Wayland