Right. And we can see that by looking at the iPad, a device halfway between a full size computer and a smartphone. Throw in a keyboard, and you can definitely use Google Sheets (Excel is so 90's), and I'd dare say you can do a lot more with a ipad today including the Internet than you ever could on Windows 98 without. The world's progressed since Windows 98 for good and bad. There are a multitude of cloud services that let you program from your iphone or ipad. Yes, that's not gcc running locally and yeah something's been lost along with progress. I miss it too. But we live in the present, not the past.
Linux is going through its own debacle with Wayland and snap, there's no clear path forwards and it looks like that's just how things are now. Like how it's 2023 and Sonos is the only game in the multi-room-audio town due to patents unless you want to hack something up.
There's no "debacle with Wayland". There was some controversy a few years ago, and some people will stick with X forever for the same reason that there are still people that will resolutely stick with sysvinit. But Wayland is not controversial in the mainstream any more than systemd is.
Snaps, on the other hand? Yeah there's certainly some controversy there. The clear aim there is a walled garden distribution. But the good thing is that you can just not use Ubuntu. Nobody is forced to use Ubuntu.
I don't know anyone with a Sonos. Yamaha's multi-room audio hasn't had any problems for me.
I'm not sure you get to decide what is controversial and what's mainstream without hard numbers behind your statements. As a single datapoint, I can say that systemd is awesome but Wayland is still crap, whenever I try to stick with it I hit a stupid issue within few weeks, debug and analyze for a week, then when I remember that I have enabled Wayland I go back to X and everything just work. I have zero ideological or personal affiliation here, I just want my stuff to work.
I don't really care whether you have issues with something Wayland-related. You can't "enable Wayland" anyway because Wayland isn't software, it's just a protocol. If you have a problem with Wayland it's like having a problem when you enable HTTP/2 on your web server. The problem is with the particular server, or the particular browser, or something in between. If you have a Wayland issue, you don't have a Wayland issue, you actually have a Gnome issue or a Firefox issue or something.
Regardless there is no 'Wayland debacle' that Linux is 'going through' with 'no clear path forwards'. There is a clear path forwards, and it isn't really controversial at all. Wayland is the clear path forwards, and in the long-run is the clearly better choice. But it is a big change and in an "ecosystem" that is so decentralised that kind of change takes a long, long time. Enabling Wayland in your particular environment might not be the best choice yet, whether because of bugs with your desktop environment or the applications you use, or because of features that aren't there yet or just general instability. But for most people it's been enabled for years and years now and it's just... better. No more screen tearing, no more buggy insecure X display server. It says something powerful that people whinged and moaned at first about it, but that their revealed preferences tell a different story: nobody was so annoyed that they were prepared to maintain X going forward. Clearly it can't actually be that important to them.
Of course I can enable Wayland - I have option to enable Wayland for GDM, and I can use Gnome over X or via Wayland. The fact that it is protocol have nothing to do with the ability of disabling and enabling, I enable and disable protocols in many other domains.
It isn't me that have issues with Wayland (or with Gnome on Wayland, if you must be pedantic). It's everyone who try to use software that you will probably categorize as rubbish but still actual people are depend on, stuff like commercial remote sessions.
> But for most people it's been enabled for years and years now and it's just... better.
If by years and years you mean a year, than sure. But it isn't the default for years and years, that's simply not true for any distro.
If you want to assert that Wayland isn't controversial show me the numbers. Find a source that most people don't use X because it works great despite no one maintains it.
Conspicuously absent from your arguments why Wayland isn't controversial: NVIDIA. Trick question long did it take to settle the controversy over which memory manager to use? The answer is indeterminable, as it is still ongoing. The NVIDIA proprietary drivers used with GBM and Wayland still work like crap, the driver architecture is stacked heavily in favor of EGLStreams, and there is no fix but to either switch to Nouveau and lose performance, CUDA, and lots of HW-accelerated video codecs, use GNOME or KDE and hope that they don't drop support for NVIDIA, or hope and pray that someday NVIDIA will open-source its drivers so that others can fix their bugs for them.
> Throw in a keyboard, and you can definitely use Google Sheets (Excel is so 90's), and I'd dare say you can do a lot more with a ipad today including the Internet than you ever could on Windows 98 without.
If you're going to be using Google or web apps, why even bother paying the Apple tax?
Battery life and responsiveness. Eg there's no alternative to the M2 Pro CPU. It's not just pareto optimal, but at the top of the leaderboard in both metrics
Just got a mini pc with AMD, which can hold its ground against a mac mini, but costs ~4 times less (602€ vs 2259€).
Comes with 32GB of RAM, 1 TB SSD, and Linux works great!
That's a desktop. I mentioned battery life because I was talking about laptops and tablets.
btw price grows exponentially with single threaded performance, which in turn determines responsiveness. Your link shows that the M2 Pro is much more performant even compared to your desktop. 2689 vs 2023 is a huge gap: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7735hs...
Linux is going through its own debacle with Wayland and snap, there's no clear path forwards and it looks like that's just how things are now. Like how it's 2023 and Sonos is the only game in the multi-room-audio town due to patents unless you want to hack something up.