Individual GNOME applications [LWN.net]

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jul 2, 2025 5:51 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (guest, #34648)
In reply to: Individual GNOME applications by pizza
Parent article: GNOME deepens systemd dependencies

> Feel free to supply some actual numbers.

I was using your numbers, from Debian, which back me up? After factoring out the always-non-Wayland desktops, 85% of the remaining desktops, which we don't know are Wayland or X, must be running Wayland in order for over 50% of Linux desktops to be on Wayland. That strains credulity.

But, hey, you want numbers, here are numbers:

https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=wayland
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=libx11

Debian popularity contest points to about 60% X11, 40% Wayland.

> "can buy extended support" is not the same as " a large percentage of them are probably still on RHEL 7"

The extended support is only offered because demand exists, so, yes, that actually does mean there is a lot of RHEL 7 still out there. I've actually personally used RHEL 7 machines recently -- or were they RHEL 6? -- and _NOT_ because I wanted to. I also used Ubuntu 20.04 just yesterday -- and not because I wanted to.

The corporate world really does not like to upgrade their Unix boxes. This has been true for decades and has also been obvious for decades. Or did you think Red Hat was still patching kernel version 2.6.32 in 2024 just for the funzies of it?

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Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jul 2, 2025 11:21 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> Debian popularity contest points to about 60% X11, 40% Wayland.

You're still moving the goalposts!

You started out claiming that most folks were running in a modern environment that was *incapable* of wayland. I pointed out that this was likely incorrect.

Now you're instead claiming that most folks _aren't_ running wayland. Whether you are correct or not, it's a very different proposition -- of course folks intentionally using old versions of software aren't going to have newer features that come with the newer versions.

(Meanwhile, Debian popcon numbers probably aren't representative of Debian as a whole, nor is it likely representative of the rest of the Linux ecosystem)

> The extended support is only offered because demand exists, so, yes, that actually does mean there is a lot of RHEL 7 still out there. I've actually personally used RHEL 7 machines recently --

Great, more anectdata!

....So, how many of these "lots of RHEL7[+rebuilds] out there" are *desktops* versus servers? IME it was overwhelmingly the latter, even when RHEL was the _current_ release instead of being obsoleted three times over.

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jul 2, 2025 13:21 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

Hi folks -- while this discussion is technically on-topic, it seems to have become a personal debate, and one that's less than interesting for the majority of people who follow the comments. I don't think anyone's mind will be changed here, so let's end it here, please. Thanks.

Individual GNOME applications

Posted Jul 2, 2025 13:53 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (guest, #34648) [Link]

Reply: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=64...