Never have I ever seen Rocky Horror Picture Show, and multiple people have told me that I should in the past few weeks.

OpenBSD is one of the few projects that still has the quaint, hobbyist, releases a song with every release of their OS vibe.

I didn’t say I was optimistic, just that we are at a time in our history begging for amendments and reform.

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress

An amendment needs to be proposed by 2/3 of both houses of congress, or 2/3 of states can call a convention where any amendments can be proposed. Then an amendment needs to get 3/4 of states to ratify.

If I’m reading this right, that is.

So we need 2/3 of both houses of congress and 3/4 of state legislatures to agree. A large hurdle, but doable and necessary for our democracy. We’ve done it before, and now is a time in our history begging for amendments/reform.

syzygy

Bonus points for no aeiou.

Thanks for the leads and the good conversation. I have found that being an idiot in public and then deescalating is one of the fastest ways to gather information.

Thanks for pointing out that in this case the DM is using X regardless of whatever graphical environment gets loaded when the user logs in. This really is a moot point/discussion. I’m still glad I raised it to get perspectives like yours.

You’re right that I should play around with wlroots a bit more. It’s been a while, personally. Mostly because it’s been a while since I’ve had time to just play around with my system. My life is at a point that it looks like I’ll have that free time soon, for better or for worse.

I’ll note that I do like alternative init systems for diversity and competition and because systemd was very hungry and rigid. An init system is also a bit more fundamental to system stability than a display server, so I think it’s reasonable to be critical of systemd and Wayland for contradictory reasons. Systemd has also come a very long way in the past decade plus. I have also seen it learn from the other ideas implemented in its competition, mirroring your argument. Diversity and unification are not at odds with each other, but are different parts of the same cycle of improvement.

Good to know that this has been implemented in your favorite DE! Considering how Wayland often implements things, it’s probably implemented on the DE-level, leading to a fractured configuration ecosystem. Being implemented in Wayland is different from being implemented in some of the DEs that use Wayland.

edit: if I’m wrong about that, and it is implemented in Wayland itself, please continue to correct me!

It’s not just about it being a config file, it’s also about having access to a powerful tool like xrandr within that config file.

That’s kind of my point. Something like randr is more fundamental than the DE, and its configuration shouldn’t be fractured by being DE-dependent. I personally don’t like DEs at all, and like the ability to control a more minimal system.

I’ve never needed any of those things.

I do need to change monitor configurations.

I once had an old TV that I used as a monitor that had 1027p worth of pixels instead of 1080p. Auto detection tools said it was 1080p. With xrandr I was able to modify the output to 1027p so I didn’t lose the edges of the display to the TV’s broken forced overscan design. Could you do that with Wayland?

I am serious, and I’ll tell you exactly what will change my mind. I need real tools instead of “upgrades” that have less functionality and are less usable. If Wayland (or whatever comes next) can deliver on functionality, I’ll sing its praises. For now I’m on X.

Give me real tools or get off my lawn rewilded patch of native plants and bugs!

This is why X11 is better. I’d rather have settings like this in a text file that I can copy over to my next machine than have to navigate a UI that will change on a different DE or the next upgrade.

Backwards compatibility, portability, and text-based interfaces are a virtue.

X config files aren’t “hacky scripts”, they are fundamentally more powerful, customizable, usable, and future-proof. Xrandr is a powerful and capable interface with applications across the system.

When Wayland adopts these kinds of powerful interfaces with decades of refinement I’ll switch to it. I don’t want to keep track of whether my DE uses wlroots or gnome or plasma and their independent/redundant/feature-lacking randr alternatives. Randrs should be more fundamental to the display operation than the DE. Wayland is fundamentally hacky and broken.

Edit: thank you all for the discussion. I’d like to clarify a point. I don’t just want a text file with configuration settings that implement features that I need to beg/bother the devs for. They are likely to have better things to do and it might not be a priority for them. I want access to powerful tools via the configuration files that I can make do pretty much anything if I read the documentation. Xrandr is such a tool. I don’t want setting for a feature that has to be baked into the DE which I have to beg to have implemented and which will be implemented differently across different DEs. I want flexible, dynamic, modular tools.

It’s a thermostat.

I’m coming from a field where supporting software written in the 70s is the norm.

Your argument is horribly short-sighted and wasteful.

Only 16 years old is extremely recent software that ought to be easily maintained in any sane world.

I don’t know the anime either, but the steam logo is walking away from the debian logo and then staring into the eyes of the arch logo. OP is saying that valve made the right choice by ditching debian (I thought they were using ubuntu, but that’s just a debian derivative with a bad UI on top) for arch as the basis for steamOS. For a gaming platform, I agree. You want the latest updates and software versions for gaming purposes (and proton/wine purposes), and they can hire employees to ensure they have tackled arch’s bleeding-edge instabilities before rolling the updates out to the general population.