Sven Slootweg (🔜 WHY2025) @joepie91@pixie.town

Get good at woodworking. There are two major growth industries in our future

1. Guillotines & Gibbets
2. Kink furniture

First, we deal with the billionaires. Then we fuck.

Boost if you're touch-starved and ravenously horny, or if you disapprove of payment processors being used as instruments to silence sexual expression.

Apparently a Valve employee who works on the amdgpu project is going to implement support for older AMD cards, including analog ports.

In unrelated news, Valve has expressed an interest in making SteamOS run on non-Valve systems.

In unrelated news, Windows 10 is going EOL very soon.

... is Valve planning what I think they're planning?

these people can't even be bothered to put air filters in classrooms to protect kids but banning them from the internet is so important? fuck off

What is with this sudden trend to kick anyone under 18 off the internet? Disgusting

David Graeber always mentioned work is mostly about caring and helping. Caring and helping others.

The giant Tetris has been completed. Let's go!

ETA about 10~12 hours. No rush :)

I want to defend Wayland here and explain a crucial piece that I think people are missing...

The splitting of protocols in Wayland and compositor reimplementation were to allow for new form factors. It had to sacrifice the guarantee of all desktop app functionality being present to achieve that.

The idea (as I see it) was never to have 500 desktop compositors all trying to reimplement the same thing with slight differences. Iinstead, it was for 500 different interfaces for different platforms that are compatible with the same apps (e.g. desktop, laptop, phone, car screens, AR/VR, watch). Different form factors have totally different ways of dealing with interface, but share enough common features where it makes sense to have 1 base protocol and many other ones for device/form specific features.

Problem is, while in 2008-2016 we had a ton of new experimental UIs coming out on a semi-regular basis (that was the peak of the whole convergent phone/tablet craze, smartwatches started, fancy car UI, touch tables, early AR/VR) things have quieted down. The purpose of Wayland's insane modularity hasn't been visible to most people given it's almost always complained about in a desktop contest vs X11. But X11 was literally only designed for a desktop form factor and has been refined for that 1 purpose for decades!

As an example of different form factors, Wayland lets IVI (in-vehicle infotainment) systems work way better than Xorg could have. Desktop window layouting on that platform would inherently produce massive amounts of unnecessary complexity, and the ability to direct scanout saves on power/expensive compute. Automotive Grade Linux and COVESA maintain reference interfaces for cars so companies can iterate a ton faster. Wayland gives the app compatibility and they can make the system UI work with more flexibility and ease than an X11 window manager.

Take Linux Mobile too, the compositor can reliably enforce window layout and boundaries and composition. While this could technically be done with an X window manager and compositor, doing it with Wayland guarantees reliability as the app simply doesn't have a choice or room for error. Some things like drag and drop of toolbars doesn't make much sense on mobile given how small the screens are.

There's some interfaces where X11 is basically impossible to use. In AR/VR (where i am making a Wayland compositor) the concept of a screen simply does not exist. How is an app supposed to position itself when the very concept of 3D is not part of the protocol? In Wayland I don't have to implement the protocols that don''t work (e.g. layer shell) and therefore any apps that don't need it will be compatible..

Wayland has allowed for insane levels of flexibility, things that no other display server architecture can do reasonably. Total flexibility between app and screen, direct scanout without hacks, AR/VR support, etc.

Here's some fun and useful stuff that's been done with Wayland, stuff that X11 could never reasonably do:

LG Smart TV UI: https://youtu.be/4cmYCK9PBkM
Multiple user collaboration on touch tables with arbitrary rotation: https://youtu.be/8xtjJTJAQsY
AR/VR apps running in windows and volumes at the same time, all interactable back in 2014 (eat your heart out magic leap and apple): https://github.com/evil0sheep/motorcar
Presentation slides that were themselves a Wayland compositor written in Qt and QML so therefore allowed fully interactive live demos in an integrated form factor with a very popular and easy to code UI framework: https://youtu.be/mIg1P3i2ZfI
Cosmic panels are actually Wayland compositors, meaning widgets can draw literally anything from any toolkit in any language.

Now, could Wayland devs maybe have distributed features across protocols better? Worked with app toolkit devs to ensure the protocols they made actually fit what the apps and compositors needed? Stopped bikeshedding (though imo many cases of "bikeshedding" are simply accounting for other form factors)? Absolutely!

My point here is simple: there was a reason for making it this modular, for not having a standard implementation. It wasn't just devs trying to impose some ideology, it wasn't some corporate takeover. It's good reasons that people using X11 on their desktop/laptop don't encounter. If we made something that wasn't universal, most apps wouldn't be compatible with it and therefore everything but the desktop form factor would lack apps.

i think the worst thing that trauma has taught me, is that any relationship starts with people disliking me and i need to keep proving myself until they like me

not only do people usually like you when you first start interacting together, that's why you're talking in the first place

there is also no need to prove myself to anyone, especially if they happen to not like me

i can just enjoy friendships with people and trust that they would tell me if something was wrong

is your computer too quiet?? try using starlings as storage, you’ll never have a moment of peace again!

has anyone seen my murmuration of starlings? im trying to edit some pictures

If you live in DC, there is an "Active Bystander Skills for ICE" training coming up tomorrow evening, hosted by Free DC and presented by an immigrant justice org. DM me for details if you want to attend.