Also 6.8 is at least 2 years out, so there's still time to work the remaining issues out. As far as I know only speech input remains a major problem, so hopefully they'll figure that out.
I'm sure the good people at KDE wouldn't mind delaying 6.8 if more work is needed for something as important as accessibility. And let's be real: if you don't need voice input then KDE on Wayland is ready.
Wayland very first release was 17 years ago in 2008 and QT didn't support it until 2015. xdg-desktop-portal first stable release was in 2018 and PipeWire in 2023.
I thought we had peaked with systemd when it came to FUD here but Wayland might give it a run for its money.
No one is "forcing" anything on you, and I'm finding this argument increasingly disingenuous. If you prefer the current versions then you're entirely free to keep them.
But you do not get to demand that future versions are only ever implemented your way. If that's what you want, fork the project or pay someone to do it for you. Acting entitled about the work of volunteers who are sharing it with you for free is not a good look.
Mine still works as well as expected after 17 years, 5-6 of which it spent with heavy daily use, another 2-3 with light use, only occasionally afterwards, and overall a lot of travel and airports. I could disassemble and reassemble it to the last screw easily, no special tools besides a screwdriver, no glue, upgradeable RAM and storage. Actually my one major complaint is Lenovo's use of whitelisting for wireless cards.
But I wouldn't pay $1300+ to bring it up to speed. The batteries are done, the screen is small and the backlight is yellowed and dimming. That laptop would need a lot more love to make it fully usable as a daily driver so I'd rather keep it as it is, as a memory.
It's small, sturdy, maintainable, and aesthetically pleasing. And one can still get (original) parts. Throw in enthusiast projects like this and you can have your own "Laptop of Theseus".
And that’s about it, I’d say! I find that everything else is really, really bad. It creaks, it wobbles, it warps, and it did so from day 1. The fan is loud and kicks in quite early. Well maybe the X200 isn’t as bad, but the X220 certainly is. And even after 14 years, it still smells when it gets hot.
Sorry for the rant. I really want to love it, but I just can’t.
Quality also went down while with later models - back in 2014 I was laptop shopping, based on the X2xx series reputation I tested an X240 and it was crap, even the keyboard was super bad, I ended up getting a Dell xps13 whose keyboard was miles better and it still works today.
Well "use it" is a bit of a stretch. I’m a bit of a device hoarder. It's one of my experimentation platforms for Linux stuff, currently running Fedora Kinoite (with Universal Blue).
My daily driver (of sorts, don’t really need a laptop anymore) is a MacBook Pro Late 2013, with NixOS. It’s so much better in every regard, it’s not even funny. It also still has its original battery.
Not sure, but I bought used x201 in 2014 and it died few months ago (faulty charging port, weak monitor joints). Replaced by P14s gen2 with AMD. Of course it is better in every aspect, except one disc port and overall durability.
Likewise. I don't always do this, but for problems that cost me much time or effort, I like to try to make sure that, if I wanted to reproduce a bug or problem, I'd know exactly how to write it.
Writing and understanding working correct software is, it turns out, a rather different skill from that of writing and understanding broken (or confusing) software. I'd also wager good money that the latter skill directly builds the former.
It's worth asking yourself something: people have written substantial responses to your questions in this thread. Here you answered four paragraphs with two fucking lines referencing and repeating what you've already said. How do you expect someone to react? How can you expect anybody to take seriously anything you say, write, or commit when you obviously have so little ability, or willingness, to engage with others in a manner that shows respect and thought?
I really, truly don't understand. This isn't just about manners, mores, or self-reflection. The inability or unwillingness to think about your behavior or its likely reception are stupefying.
You need to stop 'contribiting' to public projects and stop talking to people in forums until you figure this stuff out.
>I really, truly don't understand. This isn't just about manners, mores, or self-reflection. The inability or unwillingness to think about your behavior or its likely reception are stupefying.
Shower thought: what does a typical conversation with an LLM look like? You ask it a question, or you give a command. The model spends some time writing a large wall of text, or performing some large amount of work, probably asks some follow up questions. Most of the output is repetitive slop so the user scans for the direct answer to the question, or checks if the tests work, promptly ignores the follow-ups and proceeds to the next task.
Then the user goes to an online forum and carries on behaving the same way: all posts are instrumental, all of the replies are just directing, shepherding, shaping and cajoling the other users to his desired end (giving him recognition and a job).
I'm probably reading too much into this one dude but perhaps daily interaction with LLMs also changes how one interacts with other text based entities in their lives.
Well if you wanna contribute (at least as a proxy) to OSS, you need to deal with people and make them want to deal with you. If you don't do that, no PR, regardless of how perfect it is, will ever be accepted.
If you're so sure that your strategy for the future of development is correct, then prove it by building your own project, where you can fully decide which contributions are accepted, even those which are 100% ai generated. This should be easy, right? Once your project gains wide spread adoption, you can show everybody that you've been right all along. Until then, it's just empty talk.
My expectations are those of any reasonable, sensible person who has a modicum of software-development experience and any manners at all.
Incidentally, my expectations are also exactly the same as every other person who has commented on your PRs and contributions to discussion.
My expectations, lastly, are those of someone who evaluates job candidates and casts votes for and against hiring for my team.
Your website says repeatedly that you're open to work. Not only would I not hire you; I would do everything in my power to keep you out of my company and off my team. I'd wager good money that many others in this thread would, too.
If you have a problem with my expectations, you have a problem not with my expectations but with your own poor social skills and lack of professional judgment.
This isn't just "making mistakes." It's so profoundly obnoxious that I can't imagine what you've actually been doing during your apparently 30 years of experience as a software developer, such that you somehow didn't understand, or don't, why submitting these PRs is completely unacceptable.
The breezy "challenge me on this" and "it's just a proof of concept" remarks are infuriating. Pull requests are not conversation starters. They aren't for promoting something you think people should think about. The self-absorption and self-indulgence beggar belief.
Your homepage repeatedly says you're open to work and want someone to hire you. I can't imagine anybody looking at those PRs or your behavior in the discussions and concluding that you'd be a good addition to a team.
The cluelessness is mind-boggling.
It's so bad that I'm inclined to wonder whether you really are human -- or whether you're someone's stealthy, dishonest LLM experiment.
> I've worked for several companies where upgrading to a newer version of .NET was always a major pain point,
This was so difficult for the teams I work with that the person who became the team specialist in MSBuild, dotnet, and C# basically punched his ticket and received a couple of promotions. The work is so miserable and challenging that basically no one else Will take it.
I've struggled to understand why .net upgrades are so painful and laborious despite the maturity of the languages and ecosystems. I had assumed that, as with Powershell, C# and .net behind the scenes are undergoing enormous changes as Microsoft attempts to improve or add support for historically neglected platforms and hardware, and so I had assumed also that these were temporary problems, just badly managed growing pains on a path to major improvement, but I gather from your comment that the problem has a long history and is systemic. Awful.
MSBuild has been a huge source of the suffering I've experienced while working on these projects. The documentation is, in my experience, a nightmare: exhaustingly verbose, full of jargon, and uncanny in its ability to talk around an issue, concept, or functionality without clarifying anything conceptually or practically. I find this throughout Microsoft docs.
Upgrading a modern .NET (Core) version often means changing just versions in the project file. Upgrading from the old .NET Framework is bit more challenging, but we have also successfully upgraded a couple of Framework projects to modern .NET without too many issues.
Huh, maybe I misunderstood the nature of the .net work the guy I mentioned was doing. All I know directly is the pain of MSBuild itself. Thanks for the correction.
> It is entirely self-imposed stress. Teachers have unions and tenure.
You don't have the first idea what teachers do or what their jobs require.
If you really think all teachers have tenure and are supported by unions, you also have not the faintest, foggiest inkling of a clue about the job market or professional environment of most teaching in the US.
I think it's also worth pointing out that, even as you repeatedly label others "arrogant," your comments in this thread are themselves breathtaking in their arrogance. I rarely run across HN comments so condescending, dismissive, self-righteous, or self-congratulatory.
Very true. You are right. I also felt those comments about teachers being in union , job safety and all sounds like it is frozen in 1960s America. To think software jobs (forget even Amazon for a moment ) are horrible compare to tons of teaching, medical, legal and so on is indeed arrogance of first rate.
Evidently, I'm just imagining all the times my teachers went on strike in Illinois in the 2000s. There have not been any "right to work" laws in Illinois passed affecting teachers or firefighters since then. Evidently, it's all in my head that most blue states like IL, MN, MA, and NY have legal protections for public schoolteachers.
I never said I was opposed to it, either. Quite the contrary. In fact, I think public schoolteachers and firefighters have a great idea about unions, and software engineers should follow their example and unionize.
I can't tell if you're honestly misguided or if you're an HR employee at Amazon trying to derail the thread, because you completely missed my point. I don't care who has it worse. I care about who is making it bad, and what we as software engineers are going to do to make it right.
> Evidently, I'm just imagining all the times my teachers went on strike in Illinois in the 2000s. There have not been any "right to work" laws in Illinois passed affecting teachers or firefighters since then. Evidently, it's all in my head that most blue states like IL, MN, MA, and NY have legal protections for public schoolteachers.
> I can't tell if you're honestly misguided or if you're an HR employee at Amazon trying to derail the thread
This isn't productive. It's belittling, snotty, and disrespectful. You're also clearly more than intelligent enough to recognize that you're putting in people's mouths claims they haven't made.
When you can't make a point, just resort to name calling and tone policing.
I'm definitely on point that most teachers in blue states have worker protections, job security, and lax hours that no software engineer has despite comparatively low pay. In Illinois, the top end of high school teacher salaries even crosses into six figures.
I can't recall one software engineering job with tenure, let alone tenure that vests after 5-7 years.
I also can't recall one software engineering job listing with a benefits package that has the same vacation as a child and civil servant-grade health insurance, but maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. If you find a job posting like that, let me know.
If parents still spanked their children, it would be the best semi-retirement gig a person can get.
Roughly half of public-school teachers in the US have tenure. According to my reading, teachers below the university level typically receive tenure in three years, not 5-7. And yet nearly half of teachers still don't have tenure. What does that tell you about turnover in the field? And can you think of any reasons why turnover would be so high?
Private-school teachers receive none of the protections that public-school teachers receive, and not all teachers are primary or secondary-school teachers. At the university level, teaching is increasingly the work of non-tenured staff, who have no job protections or job security, beyond guarantees that cover at most the current academic year, and their benefits are a bare shadow of what tenure-track faculty receive.
Teachers work longer hours than software engineers. This isn't self-imposed. Those are what the demands of the job require. There is no way to fulfill the average teacher's responsibilities with 40 hours of work per week. Their hours are longer, by necessity, and the stress level is far higher.
I'm a software engineer with experience in teaching. My benefits package as an SWE is vastly better than anything I received at my teaching job(s) or any of the teaching jobs I interviewed for.
So I can only repeat what I've already said: you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
> If parents still spanked their children, it would be the best semi-retirement gig a person can get.
