If you are a registered entity (even non-profit), you can be fined millions of dollars.

It is a very dumb law.

They need to do what Midnight BSD did, exclude California residents from the license.

That amount of money is one developer full time maybe. Which can make a really, really big difference for an Open Source project actually.

I hope they do not take their foot too far off the gas before completing their Wayland transition.

Once KDE, GNOME, COSMIC, Budgie, and Cinnamon are all Wayland, 90% of all Linux desktops will be Wayland. With XFCE, it could be 95%.

I am looking forward to essentially all Linux desktop users being on Wayland so we can stop acting like it is not already the norm or even pretending that it is not going to happen. I am looking forward to putting it behind us and we are so close.

At the same time, I have a lot of respect for conservative desktops like Cinnamon and XFCE that, while acknowledging that Wayland is the future, are taking great pains to minimize disruption for their current users and even to allow users to keep X11 as a fully supported platform. I am all for that.

I do not expect Cinnamon to maintain X11 as an option very long after they switch to Wayland as the default. First while many distros ship Cinnamon, it is really a product of the Mint project and Mint is very much a Linux Desktop. Second, Mint does not have the resources as they point out in this article. Of course, I could be wrong.

XFCE will probably keep X11 around much longer. First, XFCE is very popular in non-Linux settings. But mostly I say this because xfwm4 itself takes very little dev effort and it is the only XFCE component really tied to x11. Xorg is essentially in features freeze. As long as XLibre does not break everything, xfwm4 will just continue to work. The other components of XFCE work fine in both environments already. The goal of xfwl4 (the XFCE Wayland compositor) is to mirror the xfwm4 experience. And xfwl4 is deferring to other components to define behaviour (eg. xfsession and xfdesktop). So, it should be easy to keep the overall XFCE experience in sync on both display servers without much wasted effort.

I have well over a dozen Linux machines running in my home. More than half of them would be considered garbage by most people. Clearly, I disagree.

I have never had a problem with LMDE. My mother has been using it for about a year now. I used to have to come solve Windows problems for her a couple times a year but she had never asked me for any help with LMDE.

Cinnamon is not a “fork” of GNOME. MATE is a fork of GNOME as MATE started from GNOME source code.

Cinnamon was a reaction to GNOME 3. But Cinnamon was written from scratch to reflect a more traditional desktop metaphor. It was not created from existing GNOME code.

In the days of GTK 3, Cinnamon shipped quite a few of the default GNOME apps. Later, when GTK4/ libadwaita appeared, Cinnamon stayed with GTK3 and formed the XApps project which did fork many GNOME apps to stay on GTK3. XApps was meant to be a cross-desktop project serving all the GTK desktop environments.

These days, Cinnamon is trying to fork libadwaita to make GTK4 apps look better on their desktop.

In general, Cinnamon is fairly conservative. They are the last major desktop environment to default to X11 for example (though you will disagree with that view if you count XFCE as one of the major DEs).

It is because it only “gets out of your way” if you like its choices. If you have different preferences, the strong opinions very much get in your way.

There is a reason GNOME extensions are so popular. And those extensions break all the time.

First, Teams works well on Linux. I have been a desktop Linux user since the 90’s and I use Teams every day (week days at least).

Second, that does not mean they use Teams as their preferred collaboration software.

Even on Windows, you use what the meeting organizer used to schedule the meeting. And if you interact with external companies, you are going to be joining Teams meetings regardless of your preferences.

And, if you had to make a reference you thought everybody would get, Teams or Zoom seem like your best bet.

So making reference to something someone one would say in Teams is not exactly Ronald McDonald admitting he eats at Wendy’s.

If Teams IS their preferred solution, I think the bigger deal may be a European company relying on a US cloud provider, even more than proprietary vs FOSS. At least, that is my view.

I would love a great Open Source video conferencing option to emerge and become popular though. As above, this kind of software has network effects and I would rather get invited to Open Source meetings if possible.

I used to be an audiophile. I spent a lot of money on speakers, and amplifiers, and DACs. But I always found the audiophile cable crowd a bit nuts. And the people that are buying audiophile versions of stuff in the digital domain are full on delusional.

I say “used to be” for two reasons. One, hearing everything does not always mean better. A lot of the time it just reveals imperfections in the recording. And depending on the space, and ambient noise, more headroom can be worse because it just pushes the quiet stuff below the background. And, you are going to have to listen to music in places that you do not have your gear and it is going to sound bad if you get too used to the good stuff. So your music life may be worse overall.

But the biggest difference is that I am older. I just cannot tell the difference as well as I used to.

But most people spend too much money on the equipment and not enough on the sources. You do not need a $20,000 setup if you are listening to badly encoded MP3 or AAC files for example.

But if you have high quality FLAC or Opus sources (or really high-end analog), you do not have to be an audiophile to tell the difference. Same with linear power supplies. You can hear the difference even if you do not spend so much money.

Like wine, audiophiles often make it more about the money they spend than the quality they are getting or the experience they are having.

That said, I can still hear well enough to know that 80% of the people that play music around me turn it up past what their amp can handle and it clips like crazy. I do not know how people listen to that.

I cannot wait until GNU HURD is ready and the GNU/Linux crowd migrates to it.

The rest of us can then replace Glibc with musl, GNU utils with UUtils, GCC with Clang and we will not have to listen to this GNU/Linux crap anymore.

I mean, all the GNU stuff is great and I use them all the time. But it is ridiculous in 2026 that people want to brand the entire OS with the makers of 3% of the packages (all of which have world-class alternatives). Especially since almost all of those packages are majority authored by Red Hat.

GNU is great and massively important historically. But the end of the GNU/Linux nonsense cannot come fast enough.

Devuan objects to some of the engineering choices in Debian, like systemd.

The authors of this project are clearly not systemd fans.

What did you replace Xorg with 10 years ago?

X11 desktops work fine and will continue to work fine. But very few people will be using them in 5 years.

Why don’t you just stick to X if you think it is better?

Of course, the rest of us have moved on to Wayland because we disagree with you.

No need to fight though. Have fun.

It is a different ecosystem. It requires time to mature and yes, you have to migrate to it in order to use it.

Moving to Wayland was a bit like moving to a different operating system from an application point of view. The toolkits made that reasonably easy for most apps but they really do not help much if you are the window manager.

So yes, compositors had to be built. This was easy enough for the big projects like GNOME and KDE but a bigger ask for smaller players. But there are lots now: GNOME, Plasma, Hyprland, MangoWC, Niri, COSMIC, Budgie, LxQT, LabWC, Wayfire, Sway, DWL, River, Wayland Maker, etc. I am sure there are many more I don’t know or forgot. There will be lots more.

And yes, a Wayland compositor is a bit like the X server and window manager combined. So, they are harder to build. Except libraries have appeared to do that. There are wlroots, Smithay, aquamarine, Louvre, and SWC. There will be more. So, a Wayland compositor is not really that much harder anymore. And it will get easier.

The XFCE project is just starting a Wayland compositor project now. It will be built mostly by a single developer. They think they will have a dev release in a few months. They are using Smithay.

Building the Wayland ecosystem took time. But we are basically there. And it is only going to get bigger and better.

CodeWeavers, also a for profit company, has indeed been at it for decades. I used to pay them to run Outlook something like 20 years ago.

If you want to imply that Valve is not contributing, your own statement works against you. Wine is not new. CodeWeavers is not new. Yet gaming on Linux only really became a thing once Valve got involved.

Most people still cannot install or configure Wine. But they can use Proton in Steam. People gaming everyday still cannot get Office or Photoshop to work. They can play Steam games but would struggle to make StarCraft run (not in Steam).

Valve is organizing all the bits to make an actual ecosystem work. It is why they created Proton vs just sending patches to Wine. It is why they have gamescope. It is why they fund FEX. If is why they created the Steamdeck and Steam Machine.

I have loved CodeWeavers literally for decades. But minimizing the impact that Valve has had on Linux gaming makes no sense.

This has been so much of the problem. The only light at the end of the tunnel is that it is literally just a matter of time until these users catch up and stop complaining.

I was excited thinking this was 3.2 and then let down to see that it is just another 3.0 update.

3.2 may not “punch Adobe in the face” but it is going to be a solid release. Most importantly, it will show that GIMP releases do not have to take years. If the time between releases drops, I am hoping that will attract more developer interest.

A better “punch Adobe in the face” candidate may be the 3.4 release. It is possible that it will finally include full support for CMYK.

Anyway, good to see a GIMP release of any kind, even if it is not 3.2 just yet.

If you like Paint.net, try Pinta.