This will be so much fun for people with legacy systems

I’ll bite. It’s getting better, but still a long way to go.

• No commercially viable remote desktop or thin client solutions. I’m not talking about just VNC, take a look at for example ThinLinc to see what I’m looking for - a complete solution. (Also, it took like ten rough years before basic unencrypted single user VNC was available at all.) Free multimillion dollar business idea right here folks!
• Related to the above point - software rendered wayland is painful. To experience this yourselves, install any distro in VirtualBox or VMWare or whatever and compare the usability between a Xorg DE (with compositing turned off) and the same Wayland DE. Just look at the click-to-photon latency and weep. I’ve seen X11 perform better with VNC over WAN.
• ”We don’t need network transparency, VNC will save us”. See points above.
• ”Every frame is perfect” went just as well as can be expected, there is a reason VSYNC is an option in games and professional graphics applications. Thanks Valve.
• I’m assuming wlroots still won’t work on Nvidia, and that the Gnome/KDE implementations are still a hodgepodge, and that Nvidia will still ask me to install the supported Xorg drivers. If I’m wrong, it only took a decade or so to get a desktop working on hardware from the dominant GPU vendor. (Tangentially related - historically the only vendor with product lines specifically for serving GPU-accelerated desktops to thin clients)
• After over a decade of struggles, we can finally (mostly) share out screens in Zoom. Or so I’m told.

But what do I know, I’ve only deployed and managed desktop linux for a few thousand people. People were screaming about these design flaws back in 2008 when this all started. The criticisms above were known and dismissed as FUD, and here we are. A few architectural changes back then, and we could have done this migration a decade faster. Just imagine, screen sharing during the pandemic!

As an example, see Arcan, a small research project with an impressively large subset of features from both X11 and Wayland (including working screen sharing, network transparency and a functioning security model). I wouldn’t use it in production, but if it was more than one guy in a basement working on it, it would probably be very usable fairly fast, compared to the decade and half that RedHat and friends have poured into Wayland thus far. Using a good architecture from the start would have done wonders. And Wayland isn’t even close to a good architecture. It’s just what we have to work with now.

Hopefully Xorg can die at some point, a decade or so from now. I’m just glad I don’t work with desktops anymore, the swap to Wayland will be painful for a lot of organisations.

Rough start? It’s been over a decade and it’s still rough.

Stability and standardisation within the kernel for kernel modules. There are plenty of commercial products that use proprietary kernel modules that basically only work on a very specific kernel version, preventing upgrades.

Or they could just open source and inline their garbage kernel modules…

I’ve seen ZFS in production use on pools with hundreds of TBs, clustered together into clusters of many PBs. The people running that don’t even think about BTRFS, and certainly won’t actively consider it for anything.

• BTRFS once had data corruption bugs. ZFS also had that, but only in very specific edge cases. That case was taken very seriously, but basically, ZFS has a reputation for not fucking up your bits even close to BTRFS
• ZFS was built and tested for use on large pools from the beginning, by Sun engineers from back when Sun was fucking amazing and not a pile of Oracle managed garbage. BTRFS still doesn’t have stable RAID5/6.
• ZFS send/recv is amazing for remote replication of large filesystems.
• DRAID is kind o the only sane thing to do with todays disk sizes, speeds and pool sizes.

But those are ancillary reasons. I’ll quote the big reason from the archwiki:

The RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes of Btrfs are fatally flawed, and should not be used for "anything but testing with throw-away data”.

For economic reasons, you need erasure coding for bigger pools, either classic RAID5/6 or DRAID. BTRFS will either melt your data in RAID5/6 or not support DRAID at all.

I have a mac I use for some specific tasks. I’ll agree the Apple is, ehh, Apple.

But mounting network fileshares is dead simple. My SMB share pops right up, authentication works fine, the user interface for it is fine. If I wanted to use it remotely, I’d just export it over my tailnet.

’sshfs’ is good for short stints of brief use, but ultimately it breaks on a protocol level as soon as your socket dies, on any OS.

Used to? It’s standard practice like everywhere.

If you can have NAND-gates, a clock and some wires, you can build anything.

Go visit https://nandgame.com/ to try it out yourself!

I’ll extend your RHEL corpo parents with the other children in the family. The majority of their revenue comes from completely legal oxycodone sales, any (alleged) trafficking is just a side hustle.

Rocky: The rich corpo parent’s least favorite child. Chill dude. Gives hugs to his parents victims. Still intends to take over the family business and run an oxycodone-empire - but ethically.

Alma: The other reasonable estranged child. Wants to take over the family business, but considers high quality ”herbal remedies” the only pain medication anyone would ever need.

Oracle: Wants to pivot the family business into more potent opioids and possibly world domination. While it’s obvious he has access to ”stuff”, you suspect he has ties to multiple cartels and possibly the yakuza. For some reason has direct numbers to several heads-of-state in his phone.

Apparently AMD couldn’t make the signal integrity work out with socketed RAM. (source: LTT video with Framework CEO)

IMHO: Up until now, using soldered RAM was lazy and cheap bullshit. But I do think we are at the limit of what’s reasonable to do over socketed RAM. In high performance datacenter applications, socketed RAM is on it’s way out (see: MI300A, Grace-{Hopper,Blackwell},Xeon Max), with onboard memory gaining ground. I think we’ll see the same trend on consumer stuff as well. Requirements on memory bandwidth and latency are going up with recent trends like powerful integrated graphics and AI-slop, and socketed RAM simply won’t work.

It’s sad, but in a few generations I think only the lower end consumer CPUs will be possible to use with socketed RAM. I’m betting the high performance consumer CPUs will require not only soldered, but on-board RAM.

Finally, some Grace Hopper to make everyone happy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gYqF6-h9Cvg

#define yeet throw
#define let const auto
#define mut &
#define skibidi exit(1)

The future is now!

I’m gonna be the boring guy.

RedHat Enterprise Linux. (Or Rocky)

Most boring distro ever. Install it, turn on all the auto updates and be happy. Install something to take backups. Ignore any new major-releases, that laptop will die before the OS hits EOL.

Benefits:

• Boring. It’s their tool, not your plaything.
• Actually works
• Will be reasonably secure over time with minimal effort and manual intervention.
• If any commercial Linux software is required, it will most likely only be supported on RHEL or Ubuntu.
• Provides web browser and word-processing. And we don’t need anything else.

Drawbacks:

• Boring (for you)
• Not ideal for gaming

If you install anything else than RHEL-derivatives or possibly Ubuntu on a machine that someone else will use, you are both in for a world of pain. It has to ”just work” without intervention by you, and it needs to keep working that way for the next 5 years.

Source: Professionally deploying and supporting multiuser desktop Linux to a few thousand users other than myself.