I went back and forth on this title because the first thing I thought this morning after I thought “I wonder how much snow there is out there” was “to use Xorg is to be entombed in the flesh of a living corpse,” and that could have been a fine heading, too. But then a thing broke in my stack as I sat down to write and I spent a few more early moments of the day working through the Discourse of a package maintainer I depend on but who is so pedantic, prickly, and bitchy to his users that by the time I was figuring out how to apply his predictably obtuse and passive aggressive advice I couldn’t help but imagine getting into a slap fight with him about that potential heading.
So here we are. This will not attract that kind of attention.
But it is. To be entombed in the flesh of a living corpse, that is.
Anyhow, why would I say that? And what does it have to do with screens?
Okay.
So, over years of Mac use I came to depend on this little haxie called Choosy, which does one thing: When you click a link that is in an app that is not a browser, it pops up a menu of all your installed browsers and lets you pick the one to open the link in. It has gotten a lot smarter over the years: You can add browser profiles to the list, you can set up very basic rules (“always use the first browser on this list that is open in this order,” for instance) and more advanced rules (“use this browser for this domain.”)
It’s great for stuff like “clicked a link in my work Slack and I want that to open in Chrome to my work profile” vs. “clicked a link in a personal Slack for complaining about Metafilter” that I want to open in Firefox.
There are a few things like that Linux-land: Browsers is one, and Junction is another. They aren’t as complete as Choosy, but they meet the basic use case, which is “work links open in this, personal links open in that.” Both run inconsistently across my several machines, despite them all having pretty closely sycned configs and all running on the same distro and desktop.
Sometimes Junction just won’t open a link. Sometimes Browsers appears below every other window and just sits there, unseeable and unclickable until I move all the other windows out of the way to get at it, because it does something to hide from the task switcher and I have to just hope that it appears at a random spot on the desktop that is not underneath something else.
So last night it finally got to that point where I couldn’t deal with it any longer. After a bunch of troubleshooting, installing from source, etc. etc. I thought “I wonder if this is an Xorg thing.”
I’ve been using Xorg on my machines because screen sharing in Zoom is weird in Wayland.
I thought it was unable to share individual windows on a call because by default when you share screen in Zoom on Wayland your choices include “the whole screen” and “a region of the screen you have to draw with the most ungodly and clumsy UI.” There is no tidy “just share this one window” option, which is a feature you depend on if you need to share the screen but don’t want everyone to see all your notifications or other windows, and hence why I was using Xorg for work instead of Wayland, which has done nothing else at all to bother me.
Unless!
Unless you go into Zoom’s screen sharing preferences, pick the advanced options, and tell it that under Wayland it is to use Pipewire. Then the sharing options change and you get “use system desktop capture” and “use system window capture” when sharing. That pops up a little transient window that lets you pick the right window.
So once I learned that, I just set my default desktop session back to Wayland and checked to see if that would also solve my Browsers/Junction problem. Yup. Both started working fine.
Which more or less gets us to the heading, which was written to not attract the attention of a certain kind of person.
But it is!
To be trapped in the flesh of a living corpse, that is.
The whole time I was trying to debug this thing, I kept thinking “I know all these people are salty about it, but what the fuck did Wayland ever do to me?” and the only answer I could come up with was “not let Zoom do screen sharing the right way.” But because empathy is something that separates us from the lower orders, I was able to generalize from that insight and realize that my papercut is surely just one of hundreds, and even though it may be the one papercut I could attribute to Wayland, there were surely people with two or three or eight papercuts.
But in addition to empathy I also have experience.
In The Linux People, that is. Because before I was a director of IT, a director of business operations, a director of engineering, or a director of tech pubs, I was a writer with the very distinct niche of “knows how to use Linux, arrived there by way of an old school *nix, but is more from what we might call the Neal Stephenson wing of the Linux party and is more enamored with UNIX as literature than UNIX as the bestest.”
So over years of writing books and bits of books and articles and reviews about Linux, moderating Linux forums, getting berated by a squad of eight IBM marketing executives for giving too much credit to Oracle for legitimizing Linux as an enterprise platform, and getting cornered by esr in the back hall of a Linux expo so he could twist my arm to write an editorial demanding Linus host the Linux kernel project on Sourceforge (I didn’t do it, and that’s why you all owe me for the creation of git in some small way), I was working from a certain anthropological remove.
One of the earliest things my observations taught me was that Linux as an idea had a weird messaging problem: Was it about the underlying technology – its POSIX adjacency I guess you could say – or was it about the means of production/distribution – its openness?
Because Linux was “new,” arriving after a pretty solid decade of Microsoft hegemony, it attracted the language of novelty, challenge to the status quo, and perhaps revolution.
I certainly came across a lot of actual “computing progressives” in the Linux world. But after a few years of managing the forums and the letters to the editor and the comment sections, I came to realize that the most vocal and opinionated segments of users were the smallish crew of actual old-school for-real UNIX old-timers and a much larger segment of people who were still mad about OS/2 Warp, complete with a Dolchstoßlegende about Microsoft and the loss of what should have been the Thousand Year Reign of … fucking IBM?
That latter crew?
They were barely manageable as community members before 9/11 – weird uncles, Robert Bork stans, and Whitewater investigation enthusiasts who had made a hobby of fine-tuning X11 font rendering and custom compiling printer drivers – who then descended into a very peculiar paranoia post-9/11 that included bizarre connections between Bill Gates and “Islamofascism” and dashing off the occasional anonymous death threat to me at three in the morning when one of my Linux sites did a run-of-network ad for Microsoft Office.
Over time I learned that anyone whose profile placed them in Texas or North Carolina but who insisted on Commonwealth “s” instead of American “z” probably had the reactionary Linux goon gene. Day-to-day conversation also revealed them to have day jobs as insurance adjusters and general contractors who nevertheless referred to the HP All-In-One on a sagging particle board desk in the living room as “one of my boxes,” and their favorite anecdotes involved refusing to help people with computers unless they agreed to install SuSE.
They suffered from deep confusion over whether a proliferation of desktop standards was good because vague handwaving about genetic diversity and possibly allusions to God Emperor Leto II or terrible because angry, tearful remembrances of our failure to will OS/2 into dominance in the face of Microsoft’s Sauron-like corruption of all that is clean and pure about computing. And a deep hatred of change. They had that, too.
Some of that was social and/or temperamental. Some of it was a curdled kind of aspiration: They liked fucking around with computers, admired “technical” people, and responded very well to opinionated screeds about the right/most secure way to do a computer thing (dude – just leave the NFS mount open, I promise nobody wants to steal your LaTeX notes on printer drivers and you’re going to make yourself sick if you keep this up) but couldn’t invest so much time in their BOfH cosplay that change was easy for them.
Anyhow, I am sure many of those people are facing federal charges for their participation in January 6 and I wonder if the Gentoo build they started before piling into their PT Cruisers to storm the capitol finished by the time they made bail.
Which is all to say, it was easy to get things all twisted about what Linux is to everyone in its orbit. Yes, there are starry eyed revolutionaries, neophiles, Stallmanites, and aethetes, but there are also angry reactionaries, luddites, traditionalists, and Microsoft conspiracy theorists (who can step you all the way from OS/2 Warp to the Gates Foundation’s work to stop malaria) who aren’t going to like anything different.