they can also base it off their previous relases becoming a hard fork like they started as.

lol i forgot that distro wars exist

Okay long story time. I’m drunk and chatty.

Wayland is in an incredibly weird place right now. It’s definetly the way forward and there literally nothing X11 does better other than having already had bugs worked out. The approach is much more responsible and flexible in the best possible ways. The devs got a demonstration of what worked and what didn’t and made all their decisions based on that.

I prefer it for mischief.

Picture this. You become “the computer guy” for a bunch of old people in your city. They don’t care how it works. They just want porn and Facebook. They hire you because you don’t care about the Vaseline on the desk. The mouse is clean so you don’t judge. They also hate the new windows and can’t afford a Mac and they are also constantly getting hit by scammers.

So I install Linux.

This is fun for multiple reasons. First I flash a couple flash drives and say “what do you do with your computer?” I boot into each of the most common distros at the time and watch how they use the machine. I study them trying to use the machine and see how they think, how they are trying to tell the machine what they want it to do. I tell them at this stage we are testing and I won’t offer help. I only want to see what is simplest for them. Which one needs the least explanation. The results are always surprising. I ask the what was the least scary and answer their questions they get their Linux distro.

They are always happier. There has only ever been ONE time they still stuck with windows. (They hated it but insisted they needed it because that’s what “people with money used”. There’s an HOA, and quicken, and….dont ask.). They don’t need me very often after. They understand the thing and what they don’t I change the machine to fit them instead of changing them to fit the machine. I come back after several years after the hardware fails and they beg me “make it work like the last one.”

I’ve been doing this for years and it’s been fantastic. Linux is a community with a great diversity of thought and execution and you can find some genius developers who think the same way that out of touch geriatric has been for 80 years. It’s very satisfying to see them using their computer in a relaxed state and almost saying they “feel heard” that someone made a machine that works the way they think. and every time I have to explain I didn’t make it, there’s many people much smarter than me that did and it did it that way because they think and work the same way. On a personal level, it’s very satisfying. They get to see they aren’t so alone and I get to be a small part of that.

and then Wayland happens.

And the priorities of development paint a fascinating picture. Things don’t get all done at the same time, especially in the Linux community. We aren’t Apple pretending to be….apple. Projects are always migrating toward some other idea. Developers focus on the priorities that matter. Wayland changes things behind the scenes in ways that are completely unimportant to the user. The desktop environment is still exactly what they want.

But for the remote access scammers who wish to do my users harm, I just ruined their day.

They don’t have a script that covers 11 different flavors of Linux. They don’t have any understanding of how this particular machine works. And the user only knows enough to use it themselves. They don’t know enough to help the scammer. And even in 2025, many of the remote access tools scammer use have not been updated for Wayland, which means they are not going to work in a way that helps scammers.

So the scam always falls apart. I roll back to a filesystem snapshot just before the last scam call received on their phones. I tell them to sign up for incogni and a year later charge their phone number. The scammers never get anywhere and I get tipped off from the user because “the tech support guy didn’t seem to know how to use my computer and I thought that was weird, so I called you.” The scammers rarely bother these people twice.

And they keep paying me to come back because this approach WORKS.

And the wayland transition is a big part of why this works.

Wayland devs, you were right. This transition matters. It does help people and it ways you don’t expect.

Back to my point. I hate mint. I fucking hate it as much as C developers hate rust. But I also respect that some of my users are made VERY happy by it. It’s trying to catch up but for now it doesn’t need to solve my problems. It needs to solve THEIR problems. And it does.

And that’s what makes this community so fun to be part of. Even in my small capacity.

Sorry for the long post. There’s a lot going on right now for me and the Linux community is one of those few collectives I’m so grateful hasn’t been perverted into something terrible yet.