I first used Linux while working on projects for my bachelor's degree. I could've probably used a VM or maybe WSL (I don't remember if it was around back then) to not have to install Linux, but I had a spare 240 GB SSD from an old laptop, so I bit the bullet, installed Ubuntu on it, and tackled the coursework. However, using Ubuntu wasn't too great of an experience. I didn't know this at the time, but my issues weren't related to Linux itself; they had to do with the package manager. Apt-get in and of itself is fine, but whenever I had to download the latest version of something, it gave me some headache. Snaps (fuck Canonical) were annoying, and while I understood PPAs, I found them unstable on a distro marketed as stable.
Around the time Windows 11 was announced, I was already moving away from daily gaming. I had quit Destiny 2, and most of my time was being spent watching anime, working, or working on my Master's degree. The games I was playing were mostly older games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Thief, Deus Ex, etc. on PC, and the rest of it was JRPGs and VNs on Vita. I don't remember what it was that exactly made me want to switch off of Windows, but it wasn’t just one issue - it was years of frustration building up. I was already managing some Debian and OpenBSD servers at my job, so I was more knowledgeable about UNIX systems than a couple years ago. I bit the bullet, looked up some tutorials, installed Arch Linux with XFCE on a VM as a test run, backed up my data, and finally installed Arch Linux with KDE Plasma 5. I didn't have the easiest installation process - I wiped one of my hard drives even (thank God I had backed it up) - but eventually, I had a working setup. It allowed me to do everything I had done in Windows without giving me a headache. Setting up a development environment was much easier (even though, for Python, I still break the rules by using global packages instead of using a virtual environment). All my emulators (haven't tried Xbox/Xbox 360 emulation yet) worked great and all the games I wanted to play either worked fine out of the box or did so with some tinkering. What I'm trying to say is, it worked great for my use case. Arch being a rolling release distro allowed me to use the new and shiny thing. It never broke anything on my system either. Only complaint I had at the time (which I still do) was how Linux does audio. I don't remember if I was using Pulseaudio or Pipewire, but I switched from one to the other, and it had all the same issues. Not being able to share my audio while screen sharing in Discord was another issue I had, but that's also audio related. At the time, this was an issue on both X11 and Wayland. As of now, I can share audio on Discord in X11 (in some applications - I still need to do more testing to confirm).
My honeymoon with Linux, more specifically KDE Plasma 5, ended when KDE Plasma 6 came out. It replaced KDE Plasma 5 on my machine, and it was utterly broken. I think it also changed my default session from X11 to Wayland, and that certainly didn't help either. Regardless, a lot of things being broken or different soured my view on Plasma 6. I was already toying with the idea of using a window manager instead of a desktop environment at the time, so I started looking around and decided on dwm. I installed it on a work laptop because I wasn't ready to go all-in yet. I had some struggles, but eventually, I managed to smooth them over. Soon after, I backed up my data again, did a fresh Arch install, and started using dwm. It's been a little over a year and a half now, and I'm still using dwm. I use KDE Dolphin for a GUI file manager because it's pretty damn good, but otherwise, I can't think of any KDE apps I have. Eventually, I wanted to try Fedora to familiarize myself with the whole Red Hat environment, but GNOME felt weird to me. I had some complaints similar to my complaints regarding Ubuntu, and Fedora felt like beta-testing a future RHEL system to me. So I formatted that drive and installed Windows on it. Basically, I've been using Linux for only two years, and I'm not an expert or an authority at it. With all that being said, we can move onto Wayland, Rust, and what I think is happening in the open source environment.
As I mentioned earlier, I've had very little experience with Wayland, but what little experience I did have wasn't positive. Even before I saw the general Wayland backlash on /g/ and elsewhere, I was running into issues with software compatibility. Most of them were small things. I remember having to change my mpv configs a lot to get them to work the way I wanted. Another was screen sharing/recording in different applications (Discord, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, OBS, ffmpeg, etc.). I couldn't figure out image previews on lf and other terminal file managers. I had somehow managed to make it work using stpv/ctpv and chafa, but it was very pixelated and blurry. There were more issues I ran into, but I digress. Eventually, I asked a friend (an oldfag from /g/) to help. He checked and saw I was on Plasma 5 under Wayland - then told me to switch to X11. I should be clear that this happened very early on, when I had first started using Linux, so I probably only experienced a tiny percentage of the issues others would experience. I don't know how good Wayland is now, and because dwm is X11 only, I'm not planning on finding out how much Wayland has improved. Maybe when I get a new laptop, I'll make an attempt to learn a new distro like Nix or something. Then I'll put dwl or Hyprland on it and see how much it has improved.
All that being said, since I'm not on Wayland and I don't develop or maintain software in the Wayland, my point of reference is other people - two in particular. One of them is Dudemanguy, the person I shamelessly stole my website's design from and probonopd, who makes Wayland users seethe daily. According to this and this blogpost from Dudemanguy, Wayland has improved quite a lot over the last couple of years. This is probably good for Wayland itself, the userspace, and maybe the devs. I say maybe because I am not sure how good it is for developers building stuff in Wayland, because I think there's a major design flaw in Wayland, due to how small it is and how everyone seems to be doing their own thing. None of that means much for me. I am a person who doesn't really want my experience to change. I don't think Wayland is better but different. I don't want to find something new to learn, especially if it's not gonna make me money or meaningfully change my experience for the better. Wayland was undercooked last time I was forced to use it (KDE Plasma 6/GNOME), and I suspect it still is. The anti-Wayland Gist from probonopd still shows a lot of features that are either missing or incompatible with what I use daily.
The other thing I really dislike is how much it is being pushed. Red Hat said they would drop support for X11 back in 2023, and they seem to be doing exactly that. I had my concerns back when I read about it, and now they seems to be getting realized. It's not just Red Hat dropping support, but other major things in the corporate Linux environment (even more so in enterprise settings). They also seem to not really care for BSD all that much, which is sad because I liked maintaining the BSD servers at my previous job more than any other - that is to say, BSD didn't really need any maintenance. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I don't think giving control of Linux/BSD to major for-profit companies seems like a good idea. Microsoft's EEE model comes to mind. Nvidia might be a money-hungry company that won't make their drivers open source, but they are a hardware company first and foremost. I'm happy whenever they do something good and don't really care when they jack up their prices or do something bad, since I am not their customer. From what I understand, Wayland also performs significantly worse with Nvidia (with both proprietary and open source drivers). While you might call Nvidia bad, Red Hat and Canonical are spawn of Satan compared to Nvidia in my opinion. It's not bad enough that Red Hat is pushing Wayland this hard - they are actively sabotaging development of X11. Thankfully, there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel with XLibre and I'm excited to see where it leads.
Similar to Wayland, I have no experience developing in Rust. I can understand why some people like the language but I don't understand why they would choose to develop in a language that ugly. It has somewhat shaped newer versions of C++ to be just as ugly as itself which I'm not too happy about. Unlike many people, I don't have a problem with Rust itself (aside from it being ugly). I dislike the cult surrounding Rust, but at the end of the day I value good software more than I disdain the community. The problem with good software in this case is, the small changes in behavior make dropping them as a replacement either hard or straight up impossible. I am happy using paru, which is written in Rust. I like bat, eza, zoxide, rg, and fd. The issue is, the small differences in behavior, syntax, etc. are so annoying. fd is the biggest offender - I rely on find so much that many of my scripts break without it (or when I replace it with fd). Although I've heard people complain about rg, my use case for grep tends to be for simple things unlike find, so I can just replace it.
Another issue with these Rust rewrites of coreutils (and some other applications) seems to be license-related. Now, I am not too big on any license. I have used GPL v2.0, GPL v3.0, LGPL v2.1 (my favorite of the bunch, since the stuff I'm currently most proud of are Python/Pip packages), BSD 3-Clause, MIT, and even Unlicense on my personal projects. However, these Rust devs take GPL v2.0 and v3.0 projects and rewrite them with permissive licenses, and I believe that is bad for the open source environment. I'm gonna refer back to my hate on Canonical, since now they are rewriting sudo to Rust with a permissive license.
All in all, refering back to what I said early on, I’m not an X11/Wayland developer - just an end user. My opinion should be treated accordingly. I really hope XLibre turns out to be as good as it seems and improves and maintains the existing software without breaking anything in my setup. Regarding Rust, time will tell. Early last year, the White House endorsed memory-safe languages - Rust in particular - in a now-deleted document. I believe that should raise concerns for everyone, not just Rust developers and Rust haters but also end users. Just as I don’t want major corporations meddling in open source development, I don’t want the government doing the same either.