[Info-vax] Microsoft (was: Re: Taking a break - Open Source on OpenVMS Conference Calls Resume)

[seasoned_geek]

On Sunday, July 3, 2022 at 5:50:44 PM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2022-07-03 20:29:43 +0000, seasoned_geek said: 
> 
> > Just what "programs" does Microsoft actually have?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software 
> 
> The core of the VSI IDE is included in that list, too. 
> 
That list isn't useful for this discussion Hoff. It lists Commodore BASIC and a host of other long dead products.

> > I'm serious. 
> 
> What evidence might or will convince you to change your beliefs? While 
> we're being serious.

Having consulting friends that work there _stop_ telling me it is what they are working on. Should they tell me? No. They simply know how much I hate Microsoft.

Legally and financially "Windows Desktop for Linux" makes sense.

https://healthitsecurity.com/news/microsoft-data-breach-exposes-38m-records-containing-pii

There are lots of security breach lawsuits they can avoid by becoming a desktop on top of the Linux distro of user's choice.


> For folks selling apps for a platform? You get to deal with what the 
> associated platform vendor offers. Donno about the others, but Qt 5 and 
> later do list Wayland support. 

Yeah....list != really work. It kinda-sorta-functions with some significant issues. If you have Wayland capable hardware and install the latest Debian with KDE desktop you can see it kinda-sorta-works. Apps have to be tweaked. Scintilla had to rush through a patch because the Qt versions were deleting text on the screen when run under Wayland.

> 
> RHEL has been shipping and defaulting to Wayland for a while now, same 
> for Fedora, and Ubuntu had switched back to Wayland when last I 
> checked. And Wayland can run X, for those that need that. 
> 
Well, no, it can't. Wayland has a partial X11 client which exists but is not required to be enabled. I run Ubuntu natively on multiple development desktops here in my office. Even 22.04 isn't running Wayland on my hardware. I had to force my last Debian install to choose Wayland.

The Fedora 36 that I have running isn't running Wayland either. At least it wasn't after I applied updates yesterday.

I had to do the Wayland dance for the last medical device I worked on. NXP has pulled X11 support from its BSP for iMX8 and later. It's slowly disappearing from OpenEmbedded world too, at least with the Toradex stuff I was last using. It's also disappeared from the Varacite world.

X11 support is severely limited. You cannot even build anything on a Wayland system that uses the X11 development libraries. To make X11 software run under Wayland, assuming you don't use EGLFS which is almost non-existent in the Wayland environments I've worked with, you have to build a docker container using debian:2-bullseye. There you can have basic X11 support. The container can access the limited X11 support Wayland has in its X11 client.

CopperSpice currently has nothing for Wayland. I haven't tested wxWidgets lately, but according to the latest release notes.

https://www.wxwidgets.org/news/2022/04/wxwidgets-3.1.6-released/

They are still fixing a lot of Wayland bugs. Qt makes the claim, they like to do that. A search of the bug database for Wayland turns up 1544.

https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-28979?jql=text%20~%20%22wayland%22

When I tried to trim it down to just what I considered "open" given all of the different "open" tags it got down to 372.

https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-96720?jql=status%20in%20(Reported%2C%20%22Need%20More%20Info%22%2C%20Open%2C%20%22In%20Progress%22%2C%20Reopened%2C%20%22To%20Do%22%2C%20Backlog)%20AND%20text%20~%20%22wayland%22

The Linux world has a lot of claims that Wayland is everywhere, but they are about as accurate as the old claims of MS operating system being on 80% of desktops back in the days of DR DOS, OS/2, and having ever motherboard sold to be a Netware file server counted as an MS operating system even though it booted a tiny bit of DR DOS then launched Netware without a single MS product involved.

Will Wayland take over the Linux world? . . . Vulkan sure didn't and that was the be-all-end-all just a few years ago.

Despite all of its flaws, people won't give up X11. Just too large an installed base.