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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Wayland is a Display Server Protocol, meaning it is a specification of how a program wanting to display something like a window communicates with another program, the display server, which handles drawing to the screen.

    It matters because it vastly simplifies and modernizes display server infrastructure.

    X is huge, with many parts from the 80s and 90s that were simply not needed today, creating a fully compliant X Server with all extensions was pretty much impossible, which is the reason pretty much only X.org existed as a full implementation.

    Some benefits for users are no screen tearing, VRR and support for more complicated setups like having multiple monitors all with a different refresh rate, which was a pain in the ass on X but is no problem on wayland.

    X is going to die, especially with the fact that frredesktop and the two big DEs, GNOME and KDE are working on it. Some distros come with wayland by default already.


  • If I develop anything with a GUI I use GTK4. It has a bit of a learning curve to it but honestly I’ve come to like it.

    I am currently creating a program for simulating networks and the drawing area is great for drawing the actual simulation because it basically allows you to have a cairo area as a widget so your possibilities there are basically unlimited and cairo is just a great drawing API.

    Also gtk is basically the only modern GUI toolkit that can be used with C, which is great because it is pretty much the only language I know well enough to program a big application with. (But GObject still feels like black magic to me)





  • I am running gentoo on 4 different systems currently.

    Setup can be a bit of a hustle, especially on exotic hardware (one of my devices is a Pine64 Quartz64) but once it’s running maintenance isn’t that big of a deal, an emerge —sync && emerge -avdu @world per week generally is all the maintenance I do.

    Also if you want to learn about linux there is probably no better way except LFS which will not leave you with a system you can easily use in day to day work.

    I say give it a shot if you have the time and are willing to learn and troubleshoot!