Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 16:54 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop by Wol
Parent article: Gentoo looks back on 2025

Compare it to the Python 3 / Perl 6 evolution.

The switch from Python 2 to 3 was long, painful, with breakage everywhere. Do you really want that with X11 / X13? Don't forget the X11 devs themselves wrote it off as unsalvageable!

Or do you want the switch from Perl 5 to ?Raku. It's the next generation of Perl, it is Perl 6, but they changed the name to make it nice and clear that it's a RADICAL upgrade, and THINGS WILL BREAK.

The difference between X11/Wayland, and Perl/Raku, is that there were plenty of people prepared to keep Perl5 alive. It's difficult to find anyone even prepared to try and keep full-fat X11 on life support. Just XWayland, and some support for Wayback, which have had 90% of their old code ripped out and now rely utterly on Wayland in order to actually do anything.

Cheers,
Wol

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 17:22 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Not really wanting to join this discussion, nor am I making any value judgement on the original topic... However, not sure your analogy makes the point you want.

Python 2 -> 3 was difficult, but there was still a lot of compatibility. It was still essentially the same language, much of the core language remained the same, just updates of libraries and APIs largely. The transition has largely succeeded, many code-bases successfully transitioned, and python3 didn't cause /too/ much pain.

Perl 5 -> 6: 6 is very different (AIUI), not at all compatible. Perl 6 appears largely to be a failure from what I can tell - and Perl has generally become irrelevant (certainly, nothing what it once was in terms of relevance).