AFAIK, the xz vulnerability was designed for Debian based on its workaround fixing systemd service status detection. Even if it shipped to something like Arch, the malicious code wouldn’t load.

The problem with HDR is that it’s very difficult to get working on X11, to the point that those who tried (NVIDIA, 8 years ago) gave up long time ago and moved on. X11/Xorg is legacy solution that is still there mostly because it always was and things still depend on it.

Wayland can get HDR and it gradually does, but it wasn’t priority for quite a long time as there was much more basic stuff missing, to the point many users wouldn’t switch until recently, and because X was still the preferred display system for most users for such a long time, it wasn’t priority to fill missing gaps on Wayland side and it wasn’t moving forward too fast.

Now that things are coming together, over half of the user base (probably) already switched to Wayland, there are more desktop/WM options on the Wayland side, with fewer showstoppers every year, finally NVIDIA drivers start working on Wayland, color management is also getting closer to be part of the official spec. It’s already possible to play games in HDR, but with some solvable caveats: if a game runs on X11 (which for Wine/Proton the Wayland driver is still experimental) they use swap-chain hack to that’s only available in the gamescope compositor, so either in full blown Steak Deck session or wrapped in nested gamescope instance. This will be more out-of-box when:

1. the stable color management protocol is actually in place, more compositors implement it (currently only gamescope and kwin_wayland have HDR)
2. winewayland.drv stabilizes and implements HDR
3. Wine and Proton run on Wayland natively by default

Around 12 years ago, I was able to break Debian or Ubuntu installs on weekly basis due to certain packages being too old, something being missing from repos so being forced to compile stuff manually, dealing with junky 3rd party repos etc. Then after switching, I hardly ever messed anything on Arch while also spending less time tweaking it than I did with Ubuntu. Even if I did break something, it was my fault. And it’s not that I cannot handle Debian-based OS installs if I have to. I think those systems are fine if they work for you by default and stock repos contain everything you need (and it’s usually enough for servers) The problem is, it’s not always like that and you just have to add some custom package (prepared by you or someone else) every once in a while, not necessarily with an official support. This is just plain easier on Arch.

Would change distro to something easier to maintain (like Arch for example), rice the experience to the oblivion, keep it forever :3

Back in a day we played with it with my cousins when they were kids (and I was teenager). There was some big insect like hornet or at least wasp with that scary noise. The younger one was afraid of it to the point he would run away, screaming and crying (no exaggeration here). And the older one loved to scary the shit out of his younger bro to the point he still mentions it with a smile sometimes even though they’re now 20+

Wayland is not a single program. It’s specification and set of basic client/server libraries that can be used to implement a compositor. Compositor are implementations of the Wayland protocol and there are multiple such programs that are different one from another, but generally serve the same purpose and are compatible with the same clients. General idea behind Wayland compositor is that it blends images from different clients into single frame that is then sent to kernel

CDs were 700MB

MPV playback and games aren’t everything, but it’s decent for the starter

Microsoft hasn’t changed all that much. They don’t see Linux as an OS to run games or MS Office with. It’s not a consumer platform and never will be, it’s more of a server/container maaybe workstation system for a tech-savvy/developer/scientist. Its UI is meant to open terminals and text editors, not movie players or game launchers. Microsoft loves Linux until it leaves the business area and try to sneak into consumer market. There’s nothing stopping them from doing harm to desktop Linux with all their „love” to Linux the modern mainframe system that happens to be industry standard. They can still patent things and do legality tricks (like in HDMI forums), try to put Windows on devices where Linux could be competition (one Linux handheld console = 10 more new Windows handhelds), bind consumers with something only Windows can run (Xbox Gamepass?) etc

The MS distro you’re talking about already exists - it is called Azure Linux (recently renamed from CBL-Mariner).

Ekhm, Steam is still 32 bit app with only X11 support. It can’t even figure out UI scaling based pn global scale. It’s generally a mess.

Would work better with Fortnite

I was trying to setup Timeshift for system snapshots on a work computer with Ubuntu. It didn’t work for some reason so I tried to first get rid of it. After uninstalling it, I wanted to remove, what I though, were remains of TS files in /run/timeshift, but the root partition was still mounted, so I rm-rfd the whole root, luckily except for home. And the computer has BIOS password with secure boot, so talking to IT dep about what I’ve done that is…. Or is it? The /boot and the initramfs was still in place, so it was dropping me to emergency shell when trying to boot. Connecting external USB to see if I can mount it, hmm doesn’t show up. Quick search on my private computer what kernel modules are required for USB storage, modprobed couple of xhci_* and bang, was able to mount it. I saved result of ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid on the drive and moved to my private PC, where I created VM and installed exact same Ubuntu with exact config (LVM+Luks) and after it was done I copied all of / content to the (now formatted as ext4) external drive using cp -a, then edited fstab and crypttab to put proper UUIDs there, set up hostname and user account accordingly. Then moved back to the borked laptop, copied the newly installed Ubuntu back to the root partition, rebooted and it worked perfectly on first try and continues to work. All of that roller coster in just a single hour.

I used to run Arch, btw

No longer* xD

I don’t feel sorry for them, that’s well deserved

They probably run something way too old for soystemd

Scares off from what exactly? They’re using some gaming system and don’t care about what’s running under the hood. They may be perfectly unaware that it’s Linux or what exactly it is and why should they even care.

The difference is, Windows no matter how shitty, is the supported OS and you can demand from your hw vendor or distributor that all features are accessible on it. I use Linux full time for 17 years and it works for me much better and I get everything done way easier than on Windows, sometimes it is as you say and I see other people using Windows computers to struggle with problems that I never had. But the reality is, Windows is what’s common for normies. If they have problem with it, they can just ask their family member/neighbor for help, or the shop where they bought their PC from.

If you stick to Steam games and skip everything else then no, it doesn’t.

I think revisiting Linux would be great idea, but the current state isn’t that far off from what he experienced few years ago. Wayland protocols aren’t fully there yet, NVIDIA still needs some work, portals, desktops, 3rd party software and hardware support, package formats bullshit… There’s shit load of pending changes still being discussed, progress is being made, and even then, adoption of new solutions will take a while. It only make sense to revisit when there’s huge technological leap. Realistically with how slow things are going sometimes, it may be the end of the decade or close before the landscape looks really different.