Re: is Wayland mature enough to be the default desktop choice in Buster?
On Sat, Apr 20, 2019 at 09:06:22PM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> I would like to request that people who dislike GNOME, and would not
> use it regardless of what we do in its downstream maintenance, should
> not reiterate that opinion in the discussion of that bug (or in this
> thread, for that matter).
That's a very reasonable request for "I don't like GNOME because {poor
ergonomics,CSD,being counterintuitive,personal preference}" type of
opinions. Those would be appropriate in a tasksel/d-i discussion, but
not here. Apologies for even mentioning those reasons earlier.
But there's also the technical matter of "GNOME and/or Wayland don't work
at all on machine XYZ". This _is_ relevant.
A good part of a Debian person's duties is testing stuff -- especially
shortly before a release. If feature X doesn't work, it is up to us to
find that, regular users would complain only after the release when it's
way too late. And here, we report that things have regressed.
Earlier in the thread, I posted a list of all machines I own, and a
report stating that I was unsuccessful attempting to even start GNOME
on any of them. But, you may dismiss that as "fancy odd stuff" (although
a nVidia card in an amd64 machine is not that odd). Thus, I just bought
a new boring ordinary machine with all pieces being mainstream, in part
specifically to be able to test mainstream stuff. And it did not work,
in this case because of a dependency[1] -- but the result is the same.
Options that don't work on a substantial part of machines must either:
a) not be the default, or
b) autodetect and disable themselves
So while you're right to protest mixing personal preferences with
technical reasons, it's better to not bury reports that things do not
work.
Meow!
[1]. Hard-hangs during boot with systemd (even a purely text install),
works fine with sysvinit+xfce all the way. As a detractor of systemd, it
is still my duty to substantiate the blame -- I've ordered a serial
console card to debug this, but received it only thursday evening then
departed for holidays friday right after work, thus didn't get around to
checking why it hangs. But, a regular person would have no chance to even
try to troubleshoot, and conclude that "Debian sucks, it doesn't work".
--
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⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Did ya know that typing "test -j8" instead of "ctest -j8"
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ will make your testsuite pass much faster, and fix bugs?
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀
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