It might be slightly off topic but I have a hard time understanding the layout of the website on mobile, it's not clear what is clickable and what's not.
Comelete rewrite are not always bad, they are _just_ very costly. You just need to do cost benefit analsys and compare it with the cost and benefit of other actions.
It’s important to remember that safety is the whole purpose of the thing. If Tor is slow, it’s annoying. If Tor is compromised, people get imprisoned or killed.
completely agree but it could be added that a new language can sometimes help explore new ideas faster, in which case maybe the routing layer and protocol can see new optimizations
This is not correct. Tor is generally not bottlenecked by the quantity of available nodes, the usual bottleneck is the quality of nodes picked by your client rather than the quantity of nodes available.
Of course, technically, this problem is related to the quantity of high quality nodes :)
Yes, but let's not forget it's voluntary based. There are lots of high quality nodes, although less which are basically burning money and getting nothing in return. We all believe in a censorship-resistant and free web but only few are willing to take action. My two small guard/middle relays are rented at 10$/m each and is only 100Mbit/s non-metered up/down because it gets expensive.
Nothing is "really anonymouse", it's all a game of information sharing and hiding. I think I now understand the difference in our definitions, for you anonymouse means that at the protocol level no one can link the transaction to "you" (defined by a set of identifiers). My defenition is just "not publicly linked to your real world identity", so for example, sending a message under a pseudu name in a public forum would be anonymous under my defenition but not anonymouse under yours. What do you think?
Necroing this, but my general opinion is that anonymousity is more of a question of extent and the shape of anonymousity sets than a binary condition of anonymouse/public. But you are correct that we can never satisfy the binary condition.
Given enough foresnsics, it's possible to link pseudoanonymouse identities to real identities. See chainalysis. I'm sure if you apply stylometry to either of our posts, you could uncover our identities. I think there was a post here doing just that.
So my real problem with the pseudoanonymouse model is that when if fails, it generally favors centralized institutions in who are capable of the surveilance needed for correlation. It is asymmetric. People say that bitcoin's transparency is a feature, but the feature is only accessible to those with the metadata, like arkham or chainalysis. Reputation systems can be very useful though.
You make it sound like it's ubiquitous and constant. Just to clarify what access means:
From Wikipedia:
> By December 2023 200,000 people living in Gaza (around 10% of the population) had received internet access through an eSIM.
> As of August 2024, according to a Palestinian source, over 70% of telecommunications have been rendered inoperable. As of June 2025, Paltel is still providing some internet and landline telephone services in southern Gaza. There have been at least 10 outages since the conflict began. The lack of reliable telecommunications has hampered efforts by first responders and humanitarian groups.
From the above it sounds like maybe 3% of the population have access (as of a year ago), and there are regular outages. It also says that access has been insufficient.
This was maybe a problem years ago, but I don't think its a pro lem these days. I see many more cases of the opposite problem, interfaces that are meant of technical users but are designed using modern mobile centric paradigms, over emphasizing negative space and progressive disclosure.
this is also a problem for tools designed for non-technical users for complex tasks that are performed frequently. your power users needs a powerful interface even if they are less technical.
Those interfaces are not likely designed by interface designers — they’re either assembled by developers using framework libraries trying mimic things that ‘look designed,’ or “designed” by visual designers that have no more business designing interfaces than Wordpress plugin developers have designing your network architecture. Your first clue is your citing the ‘mobile first’ design— The first step in any serious interface design is researching who your users are, what they need, in what environment, and with what tools. Something being mobile-first is an implementation detail that has nothing to do with the core design. You don’t notice well-designed interfaces because if it’s properly designed, you concentrate on solving your problem and not the tool that’s solving it. If you’ve got primarily technical users and you’re not giving them technical tools, or you have a lot of power users and aren’t giving them power user tools, you probably didn’t do the thing that every subsequent decision in the design process should be based on: research the who, what, where, why, and when of the interface.
The problems you cite aren’t caused by bad design, but a lack of design, altogether.
As a casual Linux user the whole waylang thing seems so bizarre, so much work for some niche technological advantages.
The people that develop Linux desktop are deeply unserious, to be fair, I assume that for most of them it's just a hobby.
I was wrong to word myself the way I did, but my comment is simple not shallow, what I'm trying to say is that the amount of work done is not worth the architectural advantages of Wayland. It's a simple argument that people in the replies didn't fail to understand, but did fail to have a good response too.
My real violation of the guidelines is this in my opinion: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."
Thanks for that! I appreciate the guideline swap, and also your original intention.
Btw, it's not uncommon that a commenter (you in this case) will respond to a mod (me in this case) with substantive information that they didn't include in their original comment, which explains what they really meant to say. We call this the 'rebound' phenomenon (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
It's a pity that the comment doesn't come out this way to begin with! But it's hard to remember that the state in one's head isn't transmitted automatically, and also hard to figure out which bits of it need to be put into a comment. Something about getting resistance (like a mod reply) stimulates this process. Maybe someday we'll figure out how to activate it more proactively.
Wayland has been around for 15+ years now and I've been using it daily for probably 10. At this point I have to assume comments like this are unserious.
Good for you. Meanwhile, many other people have been encountering _serious_ issues for much of those 10 years. This is well documented. Downplaying the issues of other users is a great way to make people dislike the product.
And I encounter _serious_ issues when I use X. Neither is perfect, but this insistence that Wayland is "not ready" because it doesn't have certain people's pet features ignores the silent majority for whom it just works and works better than X ever did.
This is not me downplaying those issues some people encounter in Wayland. But I think you're sort of doing the opposite.
Because wayland is 'ready' when X can be properly killed, i.e. wayland is working for essentially all users. As it stands a huge fraction of users have issues with it, because most users have at least one 'pet feature' which they are not willing to give up.
As far as I'm concerned, a technology being "ready" (for mainstream adoption or whatever) means that it works better than or equally well as what it's replacing for most people and at least "well enough" for a significant majority. As far as I can tell, we've been there for a while with Wayland. The vast majority of people don't have to care that they're on Wayland.
X doesn't work for essentially all users. It works for substantially fewer users than Wayland does. There are several features that X is missing, and you might call them "pet features" but they are features that the vast majority of graphical desktop users expect these days.
That's quite the claim; maybe you operate in different circles than I do, but most power users I know still avoid Wayland like the plague. X doesn't have support most of the modern fancy features, yes. But on older hardware, which people with less money usually have, X works.
* VNC is covered by wayvnc (unless you're on GNOME or maybe? KDE, but those have their own implementations)
* ssh -X should be covered by waypipe
* application software should generally work in XWayland (which okay is a little cheaty but if it works it works)
The two pain points I'm currently aware of are:
* Unified vs fractured ecosystem: In practice, everyone on X11 used Xorg and every window manager and desktop environment had the same basic features because of it. You could always control the keyboard layout via setxkbmap, every screenshot tool worked everywhere, xrandr/arandr were always available to configure displays, etc. In Wayland there is never one answer to anything; not every compositor lets you configure the keyboard and if they do each one has their own way to do it, there are 3 different screenshot protocols (supposedly KDE and wlroots are converging so only GNOME will be doing their own thing but I'm not holding my breath), display configuration is completely up to compositor choice, etc.
* The accessibility story isn't there. There's work on it, so eventually the outcome will probably be "just throw out the a11y tools you're used to and switch to these new ones", but for now the current status is "they're working on it but it isn't there yet".
I said "most" of those 10 years, since it has become much better now, especially on AMD. Nvidia is still a disaster on Wayland though, basic screen sharing apps like Zoom are broken for many users, even with PipeWire.
The response to this is usually "that program is bad, it has problems and that isn't the fault of Wayland, don't use it". But Wayland broke userspace. If these programs all work well on X, that is a Wayland problem.
Protocol, maybe, and there was no "Wayland"; there was Gnome and KDE. I was only recently able to try Labwc with LxQt, and I occasionally try to see if there are some improvements because it is not usable currently. The biggest issue is that every implementation is different; there is not even a shared common library. If Xorg developers are now working exclusively on Wayland, when are they going to start programming?
You have to understand that I don't really care about the internals of my DE. The same of true for 95% of Linux users and 99.999% of general computer users, so when I see a huge amount of effort goes into basically seemingly pointless refactoring, instead of tackling issues that are actually important to users, it is disappointing to me. I just installed KDE Manjaro and guess what? It stills uses X, and no one has an answer to what benefit Wayland has for me.
Software bitrots. Sometimes it's compiler stuff, sometimes the very usecase changes (few used the network design of X, or server-side fonts, etc. etc.). The way X got no 'attention' (so to speak) made the new technical design (passing away responsibilities) inevitable. It would have just happened slower had Wayland not existed.
> seemingly pointless refactoring, instead of tackling issues that are actually important to users
its not a dichotomy. Xorg was built on X11R6, a platform that was written circa 1993. You cannot "tackle issues important to users" based on an outdated stack. They were painted into numerous corners that only a rewrite would fix.
The threats models I have seen are easy enough to deal with inside the X ecosystem. And investing all your resources into a new system that is not backward compatible is something no serious security person would do as it leaves your existing users vulnerable
That particular scenario (listening in on other apps) is very theoretical, can you recall any attack ever using it? IIRC Windows still has the same 'ability' - and nobody cares.
Well, do you also second guess your surgeon? Why do you think you have enough domain and technical knowledge to consider your "seemingly pointless" to be relevant?
You should definitely second guess your doctor, or get a second opinion[1]. I mean everyone knows you should NEVER abruptly stop benzodiazepines due to lethal/fatal withdrawal symptoms, right? Guess what? Most of the psychiatrists I have encountered do not give a damn. It is coming from both first-hand and second-hand experiences. So yeah, you are right to second guess. Were it up to my doctors, I would have been long dead. And because I was not in the right state to second guess my doctor, I am forever left with immobility issues. I should have gotten a week long corticosteroid therapy for MS relapse. I did not, because the doctor did not give a fuck, and I was too stupid to NOT second guess. Unfortunately they do not give a damn about you here, but you should. FWIW everything I have said do not require me to have a PhD or Dr. next to my name. It is on Wikipedia, books on psychiatry, pharmacology, and so forth. It is "common knowledge" in the field that you are supposed to taper off these medications gradually, never abruptly.
[1] You would never guess the amount of times I have encountered doctors questioning the practices of another doctor. :P It happened so many times...
It's probably a distro thing. I'm on a rolling release distro (arch) and I've been using wayland on arch and it's worked great. There are still some things I struggle with, but for ~7 years I've been using wayland without major issue. Things iron themselves out pretty quickly these days when you're using a rolling release distro. This is not so for popos/ubuntu/debian etc.
The things I struggle with are very niche, like remote desktop via pipewire over ssh.
Day to day stuff is way better than x11. Remember how much fiddling used to be necessary to configure x11 for your specific devices? I've never once done that and I don't miss it at all.
> Remember how much fiddling used to be necessary to configure x11 for your specific devices?
Er. No, I don't remember that. Are you talking about needing to make a xorg.conf once upon a time? Because that hasn't been generally needed for... over a decade? Maybe two at this point?
X withering away was inevitable once you consider the 'economic' situation - very few people worked on it once the commercial Unix vendors went down. There was little practical enthusiasm for a common layer. Even before Wayland, its role was reduced more and more. Wayland is natural evolution of this where most of the work is offloaded to more resourced Desktop environments and the org mostly sets standards.
Sure, the developer culture of the people working on X has been "This is too difficult/obscure/shitty therefore it should die." There have been repeated posts about this to various forums, news.ycombinator.com included. Refusal to accept fixes, as well as a full pivot of the project to a targeted sundown instead of any attempt to attract developers to the project. Sources: The X project itself, hackernews discussions, both in articles and in comments. It's not my job to educate you.
And X11 is all the better now that fewer people are working on it. I don't need new features in my windowing system, I just need it to stay out of my way.
At some point of development, the only way to progress without spiraling complexity is to break backwards compatibility. You might be interested in studying the internals of X11 and wayland to learn more.
In a commercial project like windows, this sort of project is a total no-go. However in a collaborative community project like linux userspace, developers have more freedom to make design decisions in spite of short-term consequences.
>The people that develop Linux desktop are deeply unserio
The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
-Frank Herbert
Don't take yourself too seriously, it might ruin you!
In a commercial project like Windows this has been done many times - both Windows and MacOS switched to compositing window managers and have done deep surgery under the hood you never see. The difference is that internals can be mandated top down whereas in a bazaar model with lots of casual non interested observers throwing pot shots and no budget to support the work, relying on largely volunteer time, it’s much harder and takes longer to accomplish.
Are Linux desktop projects still run mostly by volunteers these days anymore?
The kernel itself is heavily funded by, contributed to by so many large companies. A lot of user space projects are all maintained by companies or maintainers who work for companies like Redhat, Canonical, Suse etc ...
Didn't Wayland itself get popular during Nokia/Intel Meego days? I remember there being automotive compositors, Jolla Phone all using wayland.
People do large rewrites that subtly break expectations and need to slowly add back features to get parity with the old thing at Microsoft all the time. Source: I worked there at the end of the 2000s.
Sometimes it's very visible, like they are pushing a new UI framework. Other times it's under the hood, like they changed how a lot of GDI works.
You got it backwards, once you have users, they are your "greatness", if you go to the path of self gratification, are are betraying your users.
Of course some times sacrifices have to be made, but you have to understand the graveness of them.
I don't like the current state of Windows, but Microsoft won't ever break such a huge portion of applications that run of Windows just for the sake of some refactoring.
every time I see the output of nushell I get so disappointed, they got the formatting so wrong, all the extra delimiters makes it hard to actually read the data. powershell got it right, using alignment. if you look at virtually all shell programs until the last few years you are going to see a similar, alignment based output. only recently, with the rise of the abuse of ligature, we started seeing this kind of incomprehensible blobs surrounding our text.
The author states they're using nushell's `markdown` table style because of issues with their font rendering certain characters. `rounded` is the default and indeed, `markdown` looks truly horrible in comparison.
Nushell's front page [1] shows an example of rounded, and here's an example of an even further customized version [2].
I think these are very readable. There is alignment too, but it's "local" alignment to cells in the same sub-table, not "global" to the entire table -- this is good for fitting more stuff into your terminal width without wrapping.
nushell front page is exactly what I was referring to.
Compare the legibility of the ls command in the front page to a regular ls command, it's insane how much more cluttered the nushell version is.
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