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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • resource other for learning linux (by Chris on 2026-01-05 01:57:24 GMT from New Zealand)
The poll sadly does not discover what "other" is , In my case its using an operating system, at the beginning, finding how to use the terminal, learning some commands , and generally having fun. Later learning more every day from other operating systems, and finding solutions. Another nice thing to do is find some time to solve dependency file issues for other developers and provide them your attempts at solving, particularly if you can make a program not running when you find it , to fully running.
2 • postmarketOS review (by Keith S on 2026-01-05 02:00:07 GMT from United States)
Thanks for the thorough review of postmarketOS. It was very interesting to read about a non-Android system running on a phone. I do wish the hardware had allowed you to make calls and texts, since that is a huge portion of my smartphone use.
I used GrapheneOS for about four or five years, but when my Pixel 7a battery started to die, I decided to give up on Google hardware because the last four Pixels all had the same result: a battery that will not hold a charge after less than two years of use. The available Pine Phone hardware would definitely not work for my situation. But there is a bit of light, since GrapheneOS has teased a partnership with a major Android manufacturer that would expand availability beyond Google hardware -- but not until later this year or even 2027.
3 • PinePhone (by Brad on 2026-01-05 02:02:29 GMT from United States)
Jesse did briefly mention that he couldn't test the ability to make/receive phone calls. Is there anyone out there using PinePhone (or other similar "non-Android/iOS" hardware) who can offer their experiences?
4 • Poll (by Jupiter on 2026-01-05 02:10:00 GMT from United States)
If I want some more complex-ended stuff to learn about, I check the documentation (Either the online or the MAN page if there is one) but back but in my starting days I just went in and started going crazy, read a few things online when breakage came, and if I couldn't get it fixed, I distrohopped..
Oh well.
5 • Poll (by DaveW on 2026-01-05 02:13:22 GMT from United States)
I voted Other because I use documentatiion, local and on-line, videos, and hands-on experience. This kind of poll subject really needs to be "check all that apply".
6 • Poll (by Brad on 2026-01-05 02:13:56 GMT from United States)
I choose multiple options - Documentation (local and online) and Forums, when they are "non-toxic. The only Videos that were helpful to me were Dolphin_Oracle for learning how to install MX, and the very thorough video to be found at the antiX website.
As far as Books/Classes, they were invaluable back in the day when I was first learning UNIX (and later when learning VMS), but I think I agree with @1 chel.n - I've not found modern-day Linux books to be useful. I imagine the Linux Foundation courses might be OK, but I don't want to spend the money. Are there others who can recommend specific Books or Classes?
7 • Continuing X11 development (by Keith S on 2026-01-05 02:16:19 GMT from United States)
After thinking about it Jesse's review of OpenBSD a couple of weeks ago, I decided to go back to making a new and concerted effort to get it to work as my daily driver again. I've been away from it for a few years, so I'm having to unlearn certain gnu-isms that have become habit, but it really is so much simpler to customize than any Linux system I've encountered that the initial labor of setting it up as a laptop system has been well worth it. And for those times when I just need to get something done that I haven't quite worked out yet, I have MX Linux with persistence on a flash drive that I can use in a pinch.
All of this to say that OpenBSD's version of X11R6 (called "Xenocara") works incredibly well. It is interesting to me that the OpenBSD dev who has done most of the work on it has also ported Wayland to OpenBSD and has said he thinks Wayland is the future. (Why do these Linux projects inspire such cult-like behavior?) But I'm confident that Theo won't make it part of base until it works as well or better than the existing system, in which case it will be fine with me. The main question I have remaining is, if Wayland really does replace X, who is going to convert all of the awesome small X window managers and utilities to work on Wayland while maintaining good (ISC/MIT/BSD) licenses for them?
8 • Poll (by Xander on 2026-01-05 02:20:41 GMT from United States)
I agree with Wally, one selection is not enough. Having said that, I came from the era where my high school didn't even have a computer in it period. I personally will look to online documentation first. My "kid" will immediately look to videos. Unfortunately I also agree that a fair amount of online documentation is suspect at best. To me they assume that the reader is moderately knowledgeable about computers and Linux is no exception. I'm not trying to offend anybody, but in my experience, when I go to look something up that I find 80 to 90% of the answer and am left to figure out the rest myself. That's assuming I'm able to. Though I have tinkered with various OSes for many years, I still consider myself a newbie/hobbyist. I would please ask documentation, etc. be written/answered as if the reader is a complete newbie and needs to know absolutely everything concerning the solution about their question/problem. Assume they know nothing. I've enjoyed this website for a long time. I do thank the Linux community for their ongoing efforts. Best wishes.
9 • Learning Linux (by Craig on 2026-01-05 03:16:51 GMT from United States)
I began using Linux just 5 years ago. For initial learning I bought The Linux Bible and Linux for Dummies (figuring I was pretty dumb on the subject). I also got a computer with Ubuntu pre-installed so did not need to learn that process. Then, like Chris @2 I just started tinkering to see how it worked. And I would use the Duck when I had questions. I installed and for a while dual-booted with Mint, but finally decided to go upstream to Debian. With Debian I found the documentation to be most helpful. It took me about three years to become comfortable using Linux, but today I run Debian on three machines and LMDE on one machine. Today, I still will pull one of those books off the shelf for general Linux knowledge, go to the Debian documentation, or just query the Duck when I need to learn something new.
10 • how I learned Linux... (by tom joad on 2026-01-05 03:29:39 GMT from United States)
For me there was not one way or method. I used all of them either alone or several at a time. And I am happy to say I am still learning Linux. I hope that learning never stops.
My over arching method that I used, though, was 'immersion.' Like learning a foreign language, I just jumped and took off.
I installed an OS and worked it. When problems arose I solved them and learned a bit more. When I jacked something up, I fixed it myself and I learned some more. I distro hopped and learned more. I found Distrowatch and I learned more. I spend some fun hours just playing around with Linux Commands too. I have taken a blank sheet of paper to spend time writing down all of the commands I have learned. Internet searches are a great way to learn Linux. Along each search for a specific solution I would stumble across other Linux info that was unrelated but still handy to know.
All of that learning was fun too. Because the more I leaned the faster I could fix stuff.
Immersion is the same method I used to learn MS-Dos and windows.
11 • Learning Linux from many sources (by Bobbie Sellers on 2026-01-05 05:17:51 GMT from United States)
I started learning Linux with a book Linux for Dummies with a copy of Knoppix 3.?.
There were some misprints in the book which I learned by trying various procedures.
Then a friend sent me a copy of Mandriva 2006 which I installed on a laptop
running Windows XP I used Linux through the KDE GUI and gradually began
to use the CLI. I had previously leaned and used AmigaOS but not to play games
and knew a lot about that CLI where i prepared Disks of the Month drawing on
different resources such as BBS where I learned to use TIN and PIN to deal with
Usenet and with Unix Services. I have a very in-complete knowledge of Linux
commands used thru the CLI but that is one reason why I like PCLinuxOS as
it has excellent advice for people at all levels of Linux understanding.
bliss- Dell Precision 7730- PCLOS 2026- Linux 6.12.63-pclos1- KDE Plasma 6.5.4
12 • Poll (by Dan on 2026-01-05 05:19:23 GMT from United States)
My way of learning in the late 1990's was like many of you - you just sat down, and jumped in. Hopefully find a book here or there, especially because it had a dvd, but usually it was dial-up and man pages. Help consisted of asking forum questions where you were told "RTFM!" and told to go away. You f'ked up your system once in a while. Sometimes badly. You sweated blood, stayed up all night fighting with it, drank beer, and learned to cuss a lot. And when you finally got that bad boy to boot, you immediately jumped into getting the modem and printer working. And you went out, bought new monitors and printers, and cards, that would work with linux (or at least, had the best chance) and started the cussing, drinking, night owl stint, over and over. Good times!!!
13 • New to Linux (by always_corious_about_FOSS on 2026-01-05 06:54:51 GMT from Germany)
Some friends of me changed to linux. Mostly it"s easy for them to deal with the icons. But there is one big trap for them.
the Updates
If they are coming from Windows they don"t know to do the Updates by them self and to do it nearly daily at least weekly.
14 • Resources for learning Linux (by user on 2026-01-05 08:26:57 GMT from Bulgaria)
Previously - 20% books and 80% documentation, nowadays 20% documentation and 80% AI.
15 • Learning Linux (by borgio3 on 2026-01-05 08:28:14 GMT from Italy)
The only way to learn Linux/BSD is...just use it.
16 • Linux education (by arvis on 2026-01-05 10:30:40 GMT from Latvia)
Mostly I learned by doing but I also had friend who was using Linux too so we help each other. Man pages in Linux distro are incomplete or outdated. Books have helped some but again mostly outdated. Online manual for particular distros sometimes help for installing. Forums are usually rude. I can't stand to watch the video because they take forever to get to the point then skip the important part. Google and Yandex are best but it takes a lot of trying to find right answer. Windows has much better documentation.
17 • What is your favourite resource for learning Linux? (by Jake on 2026-01-05 10:55:44 GMT from United States)
I put forums, but as a causal user I have no desire to 'learn Linux' I just want to solve any problem that might arise.
I know many forums are not any good. Debian the usual response is 'RTFM', not helpful. But there are helpful forums out there, which is why I use Ubuntu Mate, knowledgeable helpful, and also polite. Another I have used is Zorin, which at least when I used it was also very helpful forum, but it has been a few years.
18 • books (by Jeffrey on 2026-01-05 11:48:56 GMT from Czechia)
I mostly use books, as their information density is best (compare that to the narcissistic a-holes who make talking-head videos on youtube, believing they are teaching something...), plus, once you find those proverbial rare gems, you can't go wrong with them.
@1 > they're [books] often outdated before they get published.
I dare you to enumerate those books, specifically listing how they are "outdated" (especially before publication), and how much that diminishes their usefulness. I have 10-15 year-old books related to Linux and free software, and they are still very useful. No, hardly anyone writes their own .xinitrc these days, and those books don't yet mention the dominant systemd, but most of their lessons are still valid. A shell scripting book won't at all be outdated just because it features a Bash version around 4.1, and anyone capable of using such a book should be able to look up those few important differences when they find them. "Classic shell scripting" is a 20-year-old book, but it is as relevant as ever. "Modern" books might cater to your version-number fetish, but they are usually of low quality, are written by people with poor language skills, and offer hardly any of the insight and way of thinking that you'll get from many "old" but excellent books. "The AWK programming language" just received it's second edition a few years ago, but even the first edition from 1988 is still an excellent resource, far better than many up-to-date books. (I know because I've learned from it.) I think I'll stop with the examples now...
19 • Learning Linux (by computerLover on 2026-01-05 11:59:18 GMT from Greece)
Blessed with an amstrad cpc 128k of memory and a z80 processor in the 80s as a child I loved computers and the ability to control them through the basic language and assembly for the more advanced stuff. Then i had to stop using computers and concentrate on my irrelevant to CS studies as in my backward country computers were considered a gadget for gaming or archiving information for large companies or state institutions, not worthy for intelligent students like my shelf. But i was right computers were the future and suddenly in 95 I found them in front of me and connected to the internet in my uni running windows nt for the server and 95 for the clients. Thrilled to use computers once more I used all my previous dos knowledge and tried to hack into them but information was scarce about windows and a lot of the local servers serving web pages and IRC were running some unix or unix like operating system. In 98 I bought my first pc which was a laptop running windows 98se versi!
on. I had to adapt and use this point and click menu driver interface using pre-made popular programs, complicated unintuitive and buggy. I had to use anti malware programs, firewalls, got infected by viruses trojians etc. The answer to my problems in the forums and irc was to reinstall windows but i couldn't accept it. I wanted control over my system and windows were too complicated and opaque as a sytem and although i tried honestly the real information i could get was more or less nonsense and the windows interface sucked. The real answer to my needs was Linux.
To the subject, learning linux. Learning linux was a breeze compared to windows quirks; everything was logical and well documented. The real problem of the time was to get it run on a laptop, proprietary drivers and dual-booting with windows. These problems still exist today but it's much easier and the other "problem" was choice, the which distro question. Linux is more of less the same but distros can be different. Online learning was always my preferred way, at the time that was, at least for me, online documentation, official project sites, forums like linuxquestions.org and irc channels but also the RTF man pages excellent documentation btw. And saying BTW let's not forget the also excelent archwiki and other distros wiki-documentation pages. There was also several learn linux sites and a very good resource by ibm it's shelf. It was the time of ''google is your friend", you could find so many things and resources on the web and yes not all of them are correct, but that !
is how i like it it matches the open source - free software bazzar (vs cathedral) ecosystem. Nowadays our "friend" adds on the top the answer to any question or search by it's AI; probably useful give the quallity of the google results after all the SEO and politics in the search engine landscape of today 2026 and happy new year btw.
Learning linux for the new comer, my suggestion: Install linux, start with a user friendly distro like linux mint, enjoy and then move to something more addvanced debian (the easiest next step) or to something more pure Arch linux and even Slackware to enjoy full control of the system and why not try linux from scratch to see how a linux system is actually build. As of the learning material it's all there in the open, be it books, manuals a knowledgeable community and even the modern AI with it's LLM models to assist you. Sorry for the length, hope it was helpful :)
20 • Learn Linux (by Dave on 2026-01-05 12:09:40 GMT from Australia)
I'm with @16, the best way to learn is to start using it. Man pages were designed to be understood by someone who already knows the information, completely worthless.
Onkine docs can be useful and YouTube if you like videos.
21 • Opinion Poll (by kc1di on 2026-01-05 12:10:05 GMT from United States)
I have to agree with others I use a variety of learning tools. Forums are a big part of it and have a few books which early on were very helpful "Running Linux" is one of them that I have kept over the years. Don't like video much as most of them bore me. But everyone learn in their own way. I have found this site to be of help to many - https://labex.io/linuxjourney
No matter which way works best for the individual there is usually more than one path to get there. Happy New Year! ALL!
22 • What is your preferred method for learning Linux? (by Mario on 2026-01-05 12:59:55 GMT from Italy)
Books. Paper is the vehicle that has always transmitted knowledge.
23 • Poll (by dragonmouth on 2026-01-05 13:10:07 GMT from United States)
All of the above and just using it.
@#1 - "Learning Linux" does not mean learning a particular distro. The basics of GNU/Linux are the same across ALL the distros. It's like knowing how to drive. Once you learn, you can operate any car made in the last 80 years or so. There may be some features specific to a particular make/model but that is minor.
24 • All of the above, as needed (by John on 2026-01-05 13:26:46 GMT from Canada)
I just started using Linux and as I would get stuck on something, I went to the best place for solving it - Google. That would either lead to a forum post or a video or some random comment that would give me enough information to figure it out and proceed on from there.
25 • Opinion Poll (by Terry on 2026-01-05 13:30:04 GMT from United States)
I agree with @19 completely. Install a distro and start using it. Questions will arise and when they do having a book where you can actually look things up is invaluable. I have a 10+ year old book for a distro I don't even use but it serves me very well.
I bring an old Dell laptop with my distro of choice to a local brew pub and have helped a 75 year old man and a 10 year old girl (her mom was there) get started using a Linux distro. The older man prefers to look things up in a book. In fact, he always has a book with him. The young lady learns by asking questions online. Every one has a preferred way to learn and find out things that they don't know. What makes me happy is that they both continue to move forward after 'getting stuck' at some point in their respective journeys.
Happy New Year to everyone!
26 • Leranin' Linux (by crayola eater on 2026-01-05 14:14:25 GMT from United States)
My initial source of knowledge were the good old How-To 'publications' on-line, and then just geeting my hands dirty and doing it. The sense of satisfaction I had getting an X screen server up and running on Slackware 1 had me hooked.
Further learning was mostly then through books, mostly of the O Reilly persuasions, and usenet forums.
Will never be a guru, but am still satisfied.
27 • PostmarketOS and learning GNU/Linux. (by Tuxedoar. on 2026-01-05 14:34:41 GMT from Argentina)
Jesse, thank you for reviewing PostmarketOS!. I was expecting it! :P I'm glad that it was, mostly, a positive experience for you. I'm running it on an old Motorola phone. I think that PostmarketOS is a promising project!.
Here's my piece of advice to anyone interested in learning GNU/Linux:
1) Don't be afraid to use Virtual Machines (VMs)!. Nowadays, almost any computer (x86) is capable of running VMs. Even, old computers (let's say, 5 years old or even older) that by today's standards are considered "obsolete", they are also capable of running them. I think they're great to experiment with GNU/Linux distros and learn, side-to-side to your main OS while the latter being unnafected by it. Feel free to make mistakes as much as you need, since you can always go backwards by using "snapshots". VirtualBox is a good option for getting started with VMs on Windows.
2) Try some of the major distros considered to be "friendly" (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc) and then try to stick to one of them for learning.
3) I think that books are stil a valuable resource for learning GNU/Linux. In particular, for learning basic commands, 95% of them haven't changed the way they are used in decades. So, for command line learning, even if such a book is old, it shouldn't be much relevant .
4) If you decide to do the migration, I suggest anyone to choose a "Long Term Support" (LTS) version of a distro, whenever possible!. This way, it's less probable that things may stop working overnight. Plus, you'll have security updates for, at least, 4 years.
5) If you feel inclined for an in-depth technical GNU/Linux stuff, take a look at the ArchLinux wiki. It's of great quality!.
Cheers.
28 • Poll (by Wolf66 on 2026-01-05 16:01:01 GMT from United States)
When I started with Linux back when Windows 95 was new, I just downloaded Slackware, installed it and had so many issues setting it up. But I knew Windows wasn't for me. So, I went to their forums. Back then, people were different, trolls were kept in check. But I digress. The people I met in the forums were amazing. They helped me sort my issues out and taught me everything I needed and taught me things I didn't think I would need. Patrick Volkerding and the community were great people.
Anyway, there should've been an option in the poll for multiple sources.
29 • Learning Linux (by David on 2026-01-05 16:49:54 GMT from United Kingdom)
My first Linux was a port of Red Hat to the Motorola 68000 architecture on the Q60, dual booting with QDOS. The only information I could find was a book on Unix! When I replaced that computer with a PC, I bought Linux for Dummies, complete with a CD of Fedora 1. These days, I rely on forums and on-line documentation, but I'd still rather have a good book.
30 • PinePhone and Phosh performance (by Eric on 2026-01-05 17:04:35 GMT from Sweden)
The article says 4 time that the hardware of PinePhone is "limited", but in what sense is it limited? It has 2 times cores of iPad 2 with circa 15% more speed each, and 4 times RAM. The GPU is in the same class - roughly the same performance as desktop AGP graphics cards in 2003. The eMMC read speed is 55 MB/s or more - on par with mid-2000s HDDs or faster. Maybe the software is written in Java? No, it is C. Surely the hardware performance is more than adequate for the same tasks as the iPad 2 use cases. The UI should not feel slow.
31 • postmarketOS resource usage (by Eric on 2026-01-05 17:25:35 GMT from United States)
I wouldn't regard 450 MB RAM out of 2 GB as "minimal" resource usage. KDE Plasma 4 used < 300 MB (including not just Plasma but the full OS) and was reputed as somewhat memory-heavy...
32 • Learn Linux (by David on 2026-01-05 18:50:50 GMT from United States)
Learn Linux???
Does the op mean learn Linux as the kernel. If that's the case, then the way I learn is by writing drivers to interact with hardware through the I/O processes.
Or does the op mean learn Linux through its various applications that sit on top of the kernel. If that's the case, then I learn it by using it everyday to get tasks completed.
33 • Learning GNU-Linux (by Roger on 2026-01-05 18:59:31 GMT from France)
Learning GNU-Linux is just doing it and learning from your mistakes.
I started in 1998 with BeOS and kept on going further slowly.
34 • @19 (by chel.n on 2026-01-05 16:36:39 GMT from Czechia)
Well, let's see. Just looking at the small stack of books on my nightstand alone:
- Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Desktop: Applications and Administration, by Richard Petersen
- Mastering Debian 11: The Complete Guide to Installation, Configuration, and Advanced Features, by Morgan Patridge
- The Debian Administrator's Handbook: Debian Bullseye from Discovery to Mastery, by Raphael Hertzog and Roland Mas
And that's not even including books that aren't exclusively about Linux but have large parts of them dedicated to Linux, such as Operating Systems Concepts, by Abraham Silberschatz, Peter B. Galvin and Greg Gagne.
Many of the given examples don't work as written, because the commands or file paths aren't the same anymore (nor trivially different). And they already didn't when these books first rolled off the press. Thus such books are largely useless to anyone who doesn't already know how (and therefore doesn't need the book in the first place).
And that is faaaaaaaaar from an exhaustive list of the books on Linux that I've seen over the last 20 years which are instantly so obsolete as to be of no practical use whatsoever. But judging by how emotion-driven your knee-jerk melt-down is, presumably you are precisely one of those ignorant monkeys that make Linux forums even worse than outdated books. So why bother enumerating more examples? You don't actually care, you just want to tell a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
35 • learn by breaking stuff (by Matt on 2026-01-05 19:04:37 GMT from United States)
My best learning experiences came after breaking something and then trying to fix it!
There are lots of ways to get broken Linux installs. Just try and you will succeed!
If you want to get a broken install as fast as possible, buy a new laptop with bleeding edge hardware and install linux on it. Your chance of successfully having a broken install increases dramatically if that laptop is manufactured by Lenovo. If you can't afford the new laptop with a poorly supported hardware, just install Arch on whatever hardware you already have. You will undoubtedly break stuff during the install. After you successfully install it and pat yourself on the back, just keep updating all the software every day. Heck, update twice a day. After a month or so, it will break again so you can learn more.
36 • X11 XENOCARA and Wayland (by rhtoras on 2026-01-05 16:53:43 GMT from Greece)
@8 VERY NICE COMMENT... i also use openbsd along Void linux. Well xenocara works and works just fine... i just do not trust red hat and it also happens that redhat is involved in both X11 na wayland so a fork of X11 would be nice... OK maybe wayland is the future but the future is not always bright... for example... neofetch stopped but is fastfetch better ? I do not think so... X11 is a little complicated but at least it works without flaws... wayland is not complicated but has many many flaws till now... AND this is where people on linux community tend to reinvent the wheel...
i want fvwm 1,2 and 3 to work on wayland... do they work ? Nope... what will happen tgo all these projects ? Please keep X11 for those of us who tend to like the classics... in the end of the day options never hurt...
37 • @4 Pinephone (by Cheker on 2026-01-05 19:49:10 GMT from Portugal)
@4 I used the Pinephone as my main phone for around a month back in 2021, in-between changing Android phones. The volume during calls was low and I couldn't raise it past a certain point, but that was about it. Receiving, calling, just worked. I asked other people how I sounded to them and was told it was fine.
The most annoying thing about the experience was the battery. I was charging the damn thing every day, sometimes twice a day, with light usage. My experience in this realm seems to be worse than most people. I don't know if my battery is defective or others have a higher tolerance for what a draining battery looks like.
38 • @37 X11 survival (by picamanic on 2026-01-05 20:03:55 GMT from United Kingdom)
@37 X11 survival: My quite reasonable fear is that the likes of Redhat will "sabotage" Linux X11, while Wayland is nowhere ready to replace it. We can hope that Xlibre and Phoenix [rewrite of X11 in Zig] will protect against this act of neglect, Troubling times.
39 • Poll & X11 (by Pogi Americano on 2026-01-05 21:03:46 GMT from United States)
I started in the early 90s with Slackware. I was reading some tech news and the word "free' caught my eye. I just downloaded it onto floppies and loaded it on an old computer. It took about a year before I could use it as a daily computer for research and writing. I joined a Slackware forum and a general Linux forum and read books, all kinds of books and anything Linux on the net that I could find. I haven't used Windows or Mac since '95. There are still times I have to crack a book open or ask in a forum or just search the net for an answer. And there are still times when I just sit and hash out a problem through trial and error. So, for the Poll - All of the above.
I agree with @37, "in the end of the day options never hurt... "
40 • Best option (by The Mekon on 2026-01-06 09:08:02 GMT from United Kingdom)
Choose EASY OS! You'll have a direct line to author Barry (&his PuppyOS friends). If anything needs fixing, explaining, modifying he'll work on it before W. Coast US is awake and report back on his forum. Recommended.
41 • Learning Linux (by Mike on 2026-01-06 09:34:34 GMT from The Netherlands)
When I started working with Linux, back in the Mepis-days, we used IRC to communicatie with other Linux-users and learn how to get things working.
Nowadays google and AI help to figure out stuff>
There is an issue with that though: old articles. Sometimes you find outdated information in articles that do not show the date they were pubished. They should be removed, but noone does that.
42 • What is your preferred method for learning Linux ? (by eb on 2026-01-06 09:37:19 GMT from France)
Learning command line tools !:-).
43 • Resources (by Jesse on 2026-01-06 12:36:53 GMT from Canada)
@31: " KDE Plasma 4 used < 300 MB (including not just Plasma but the full OS) and was reputed as somewhat memory-heavy..."
KDE 4 also launched (checks calendar) 18 years ago. Comparing current desktop resource usage to a desktop environment that is old enough to vote doesn't really make sense.
@30: "The article says 4 time that the hardware of PinePhone is "limited", but in what sense is it limited? It has 2 times cores of iPad 2 with circa 15% more speed each, and 4 times RAM. "
It's limited in that, even when the PinePhone was launched, it had specs which were considered quite low at the time. That was over 3 years ago. Its capabilities are considered low by any modern smartphone or laptop. Its even considered unusually low compared to a cheap, single board computer like the Raspberry 'Pi. (The Pi 5 has 4 times the amount of RAM the PinePhone has.)
The iPad 2 was released in 2011, that's 15 years ago. It has woefully low specs for a modern device.
Comments like these make me wonder if we entered a time warp. Hardware and software specifications change rapidly. Comparing modern devices to technology that was new nearly two decades ago doesn't make sense.
44 • Learning Linux, X11 (by Robert on 2026-01-06 15:39:14 GMT from United States)
Online documentation is the best. I learned all the basics from doing LFS/BLFS, and the Arch Wiki has been the best resource after that. Most of what I need today can be found there, but sometimes I'll need random forum posts, another knowledgebase such as Gentoo's, or documentation on git repos.
On X11, quote
"While Wayland does offer some attractive features, particularly in terms of security, it is less efficient in terms of performance and memory when compared to X.Org"
I'm gonna need to see some numbers on that. Meaning I myself ought to go look at some benchmarks and measurements. Because part of the reasoning behind Wayland is that X.org is bloated and the protocol involves too much talking back and forth because the server and compositor are separate (or something like that, been a while since I watched the talk). So *in theory* Wayland should be faster and more efficient.
In any case, I've been a happy Wayland user for years, but it makes no difference to me if other people want to continue on with X.org. I'm just happy that there are people stepping up to maintain it one way or another instead of crying about nobody maintaining it for them.
45 • Wayland and X11 (by Jesse on 2026-01-06 15:55:04 GMT from Canada)
@44: "I'm gonna need to see some numbers on that. Meaning I myself ought to go look at some benchmarks and measurements."
We linked to a series of Wayland vs X11 benchmarks which covered multiple desktops and configurations a few months back: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250714#news
They matched my own findings. In fact, I've pointed out in multiple reviews that Wayland takes significantly more resources to run than X11 and runs slower.
"Because part of the reasoning behind Wayland is that X.org is bloated and the protocol involves too much talking back and forth"
This is not the case. The main reasoning behind Wayland is that it _should_ be more secure and it removes a bunch of cruft/unused features X11 had that the developers found tricky to maintain. It has nothing to do with efficiency or performance. Wayland is visibly slower than X11 on low-end equipment and takes around 30% more RAM (depending on the desktop) and uses more CPU.
Don't take my word for it, fire up a Wayland session and look at your CPU and memory stats. Then sign out and log into the same desktop's X11 session. The difference will be immediately obvious. Especially if you're doing this on a low-end device like a phone or Pi.
46 • @45 Wayland and X11 (by Robert on 2026-01-06 16:01:45 GMT from United States)
Security and maintainability were for sure the primary motivators for Wayland, not arguing against that at all. I will have to see if I can dig up that talk I mentioned - I know it talked about how the X11 protocol was inefficient.
As a Wayfire user I don't have the option of logging in to an X11 session to compare, and I'd rather not install a big desktop for no other reason than to compare. But I will have a look at the benchmarks you linked.
47 • @44 (by rb on 2026-01-06 16:06:04 GMT from United States)
"I'm gonna need to see some numbers on that. Meaning I myself ought to go look at some benchmarks and measurements. Because part of the reasoning behind Wayland is that X.org is bloated and the protocol involves too much talking back and forth because the server and compositor are separate (or something like that, been a while since I watched the talk). So *in theory* Wayland should be faster and more efficient."
There is no theory that says Wayland is faster and more efficient. That is your assumption.
A good portion of Gentoo users still use X11. While still an option, most Gentoo users avoid Wayland and Systemd, both are resource heavy compared to their traditional counterparts. Wayland is not better generally speaking. It claims to address security issues. These are not necessarily issues for every day users, these are issues that most often affect corporate use. The average single user computer is generally speaking not highly affected by the security issues that Wayland seeks to address. Wayland is not significantly faster, more efficient, or feature enhanced than its predecessor by any means. X11 provides the framework and essentially does all the work, but Wayland only provides the protocol and each individual software component is required to do the work. Wayland is only as fast and efficient as the various components that implement the protocols.
48 • Resources (by Eric on 2026-01-06 17:20:38 GMT from Poland)
@43: "Hardware and software specifications change rapidly. Comparing modern devices to technology that was new nearly two decades ago doesn't make sense."
Jesse, I agree that the environment in which we use our devices changes. We now have higher-resolution video files and images compressed by more CPU-intensive codecs and ubiquitous HTTPS in the web. Newer games are more resource-hungry, as always. Advanced machine learning features (like automated image tagging by neural network inference) can be somewhat CPU-intensive. PinePhone CPU has AES instructions and supports H.265 decoding in hardware, even in 4K, but obviously not AV1 or newer formats. So what else changed much that is relevant to the typical tablet usage (let's not consider 5G and cellular bands)?
"Comparing current desktop resource usage to a desktop environment that is old enough to vote doesn't really make sense".
Does the current graphical shell has more features that really help its users, but which require a lot of resources? KDE 4 is surely mature by now :-), and 11 years ago it was still mainstream and current, and its memory usage in early 2015 was still below 300 MB. OK, Phoc is Wayland and Kwin was X11, but I fail to see a reason why a Wayland compositor inherently must require more resources than an X compositor. It was the other way around for early Wayland compositors.
49 • Wayland and security (by Eric on 2026-01-06 17:35:07 GMT from Switzerland)
@47:
"It claims to address security issues. These are not necessarily issues for every day users, these are issues that most often affect corporate use. The average single user computer is generally speaking not highly affected by the security issues that Wayland seeks to address."
X11 as implemented by X.org and the freedesktop.org ecosystem effectively prevents application sandboxing (except by using a separate unprivileged X server for the sandboxed apps). Any website that has a 0-day browser JS exploit on one of its pages, or any Flatpak/Snap app can freely interact with any GUI control in every window, effectively having the same permissions as trusted applications. If the user is sudoer, then these permissions are superuser rights, it is possible to do everything: format the disk, re-flash firmware, install a rootkit...
50 • Wayland (by Eric on 2026-01-06 17:43:17 GMT from Poland)
@45:
"Wayland ... takes around 30% more RAM (depending on the desktop)"
Perhaps it is partly because of the XWayland X server process needed for compatibility with X applications, isn't it?
51 • Correction (by Eric on 2026-01-06 17:58:02 GMT from Sweden)
@48
> PinePhone CPU
"The PinePhone CPU"
> Does the current graphical shell has
Sorry, should be "does the current graphical shell have".
52 • Phosh (by Eric on 2026-01-06 18:17:12 GMT from Germany)
Please don't take me wrong, Phosh is an amazing effort by Purism and other contributors, just perhaps its performance can be somewhat non-ideal because of its reliance on GTK4 and modern Gnome libraries.
53 • Yet another language blunder (by Eric on 2026-01-06 20:08:23 GMT from Poland)
@52:
"Don't take" - should be "don't get", of course. Sorry.
54 • X11 CVE exploits (by Keith S on 2026-01-06 21:13:51 GMT from United States)
@49 I can't find a CVE newer than 2024 that describes any X11 CVE that might allow such an exploit. Do you have a specific example of such an exploit that has not been discovered and fixed?
55 • X11 / Wayland (by Keith S on 2026-01-06 21:18:09 GMT from United States)
Again, the basic problem I have is not with Wayland itself, but some of the claims made by Wayland evangelists, such as "X11 has security issues" and "the adoption of Wayland and its replacement of X is inevitable." They are similar to the claims made for systemd and for Rust replacing C everywhere, but when something negative happens on any of those fronts, the evangelists go quiet. Not long ago large sections of the internet went down when Cloudflare crashed shortly after replacing its core with new Rust code, for example. There's not a lot of discussion about that though.
56 • X11 CVE exploits (by Eric on 2026-01-06 22:09:22 GMT from Switzerland)
@54:
It's not a bug - it is by design and works as documented, so there is no CVE identifier AFAIK. Take a look at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/215775/security-model-of-linux-password-entry and the articles that the answer links to: https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/04/linux-security-circus-on-gui-isolation.html and https://lwn.net/Articles/517375/ "XDC2012: Graphics stack security".
57 • @56 X11 (by picamanic on 2026-01-07 04:45:09 GMT from United Kingdom)
@56 X11: Security. I have lived with what Joanna Rutkowska described in her 2011 bog post, not really knowing if there are practical malware attacks that can exploit this gap in X11 security. If you know of any exploits, please don't tell me what they are on Distrowatch! The only solution to date has been Joanna Rutkowska deploying QubesOS, but there are issues with resources and [for me] systemd.
58 • X11, Wayland, and User Choice (by anon on 2026-01-07 07:32:53 GMT from United States)
@7: The best thing about OpenBSD, or any of the BSD's really, is that they leave the choice to the user. X11 and Wayland are both available in ports, so you can install and use whichever one you choose. Neither one is a part of the base system, and neither one is forced on you against your will - though the OS installer gives you the option to install X11 with a window manager out of the box. Myself and many others choose the base install with no graphical components, and we proceed to install and configure the display manager of our choice. I run OpenBSD as a server, and there is no need for a graphical environment on that particular machine. I also run OpenBSD as a daily driver, and I did a full graphical setup on that machine. The fact that the base OS lets me choose without forcing anything on me or assuming my use case is something that I greatly appreciate. Arch and Gentoo also provide that choice.
59 • My way of learning Linux (when migrating from Windows) (by pavlos on 2026-01-07 18:35:42 GMT from Poland)
Phase 1: VirtualBox on Windows, installing several Linux distros, playing around, learning basics
Phase 2: still on VB, trying to find proper native Linux software to repeat my Windows use cases and making decisions: which distro has all apps I need? which distro gives the most comprehensive support? which desktop environment?
Phase 3: installation of selected distro and desktop environment on a partition of my computer, installing applications, copying/sharing data with my Windows partitions, learning to live with Linux, still keeping Windows for emergency purposes
Final phase 4: making backup of everything from my Windows life, repartitioning my hard drive to have only Linux, installing from the scratch, reinstalling apps, recovering data. Goo-bye Windows. It's already 10+ years ago. For good and ever ;)
60 • X11 (by Eric on 2026-01-07 18:41:45 GMT from Poland)
@57:
"The only solution to date has been Joanna Rutkowska deploying QubesOS, but there are issues with resources and [for me] systemd".
It depends on your threat model. Qubes OS is a comprehensive solution, but there are more lightweight (but not so bulletproof) alternatives, even when using X11: it is possible to isolate the application in a separate X server like Xephyr or Xpra, cf. https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/x11-guide/ for details. It is impractical to do this with every application, however. By the way, the new Phoenix X11 server - reported in the news section - looks promising, I think it can achieve security by partially breaking compatibility, but right now it seems to be a one-man effort by a single pseudonymous developer...
61 • Learning Linux...or Cobol...or Rust...or FreeBSD...or adjusting the carburetor.. (by R. Cain on 2026-01-07 22:29:49 GMT from United States)
To all you who think that 'distro-hopping', U-Tube, and/or the "smart"phone are the greatest answers to learning, consider the following: the path to learning in most institutions of learning---starting at home, before kindergarten---is... __BOOKS__.
SURPRISE!!!
I wonder why.
(To all you who think that 'distro-hopping', U-Tube, and/or the "smart"phone are the greatest answers to learning: do you even KNOW WHY " " and "" are phrased / written the way they are?)
--------------------------------------------------------------
"The man who WILL NOT read has no advantage over the man who cannot read."--Mark Twain
62 • PinePhone (by DivestOS on 2026-01-08 04:35:29 GMT from Canada)
Thanks I have learned some critical things.
PostMarketOS Gnome worked at 3G.
It has not worked on 4G.
I updated the Modem firmware. I have been unable to update the ADSP firmware. I thought my issue was related to that.
I was unaware until Jessie mentioned that channel 66 is not supported.
I am also surprised that Ubuntu Touch is no longer supported. I thought Oren was doing things differently because its mainline with no Halium layer.
There are still 3 other distros like SailfishOS, Arch & Maemo Leste that still seem to be supported that I have not tried.
63 • @60 X11 feature mitigations (by picamanic on 2026-01-08 09:52:27 GMT from United Kingdom)
@60 X11 feature mitigations. I have tried using Xephyr to resolve these X11 flaws, but so far I have failed to remove this problem. I will try again, just in case. I have tried using KVM/Qemu and Xen as a lightweight way of replicating QubesOS. I am just not smart enough to get these things to work!
64 • Wayland vs X11 footprint... (by rhtoras on 2026-01-08 23:48:52 GMT from Greece)
@44 WHAT you say happened with systemD. Back then they were talking: "oh lets bring systemD because it is faster and has faster boot times too" the same people in 2026 say: "but who cares about boot times, use nvme". The facts say systemD was back then a little faster (only compared with sysV because everything else was faster). Nowdays though is slower compare to any other init available. And here comes the X11 thing... Now they are saying wayland is faster only to come back in a few years to say "but who cares about speed times ?" Same people, same philosophy.
p.s I am not saying wayland is bad in any means (like systemD is)... it's just different. I like Xorg, i like Xorg forks but have no problem with Wayland whatsoever (till microsoft put in their hands along redhat).
65 • @64 Wayland versus X11 (by picamanic on 2026-01-09 12:04:33 GMT from United Kingdom)
@64 Wayland versus X11: same as SystemD versus SysVinit? Mature [old], battle tested, dwindling support versus New, faster, better supported. But with SystemD there is an Elephant in the room: SystemD is 2 million lines of C, whereas modern alternatives are only 2-6k lines of code. I have always known that code bloat creates a support dependency on an industrial scale.
If Wayland is ever able to replace the funtionality of X11, I will use it. Until then, I cannot see the merit of deliberately neglecting X11, so that users feel compelled to use Wayland.
66 • X11 or Wasteland? (by We all float down on 2026-01-09 15:57:28 GMT from The Netherlands)
None of the above! To paraphrase Ken Thompson, all that (overhead) for just a terminal?
If I want a super fast boot and less distraction I can use, today, SliTaz base, start screen (or tmux) with two clients, a shell and the links browser in text mode, copy/paste text without a mouse in, let's see, 13972KB RAM (hard limit mem=20M kernel parameter guestimate) and still bore you all to bits here.
If I do want the pretty pictures I can openvt and still escape man-made GTK/C++/Rust horrors by using links -g in a framebuffer. Now, if someone could combine this with edbrowse, that would be great.
Thank you for your attention to this nutter.
67 • @4 phone calls (by Kazlu on 2026-01-09 16:23:20 GMT from France)
I have been using a Sony Xperia X 10 II with SailfishOS. So, nor Pinephone neither PostmarketOS, but qualifies as "non-Androif/iOS" phone. It worked fine. I had trouble once abroad where tethering worked and then stopped working, and I received every SMS in 10 copies. But it was a couple of years ago. MMS comes and go, works if you toggle between 3G and 4G.
68 • Systemd (by Eric on 2026-01-09 16:46:22 GMT from Sweden)
@65:
"SystemD there is an Elephant in the room: SystemD is 2 million lines of C, whereas modern alternatives are only 2-6k lines of code."
Systemd is now actually circa 700 thousands lines of C code (this number was 2 times smaller in 2017), as you can see at https://sources.debian.org/src/systemd/259-1. The minimalist alternatives are init/service management only, you most likely also need syslog (>100k now for rsyslog, but this number includes tests), cron, chrony or ntp, resolvconf, elogind or ConsoleKit etc. for the same functionality. A few of architectural decisions in systemd are right and useful but other features are annoying or questionable.
69 • FreeBSD and WiFi (by OhNo on 2026-01-09 19:02:13 GMT from United Kingdom)
Meanwhile, WPA3 support is still missing in action...
70 • Overhead (by Keith S on 2026-01-09 21:22:27 GMT from United States)
@66 As a fellow minimalist, I appreciate your general drift, but we are no longer living in a world where the $120,000 PDP-1 with 288Kb modular magnetic core memory running at 200kHz is king of the hill, so a Ken Thompson quote from the days when he was still running B language from his terminal is a bit misleading. Crucial will sell you 128GB of fast RAM for under $600, even though that price is inflated by the AI chuds' demand for more resources. But I agree that less is more, generally speaking.
Number of Comments: 70
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