Linuxiac

https://linuxiac.com/fedora-and-opensuse-are-dropping-support-for-some-video-codecs/

It is only affecting Fedora and openSuse. Not affected are Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu and Debian.

* The hardware-acceleration is within the hardware and not in software - that is why it is named *hardware acceleration*. Fedoras decision doesn't make sense.
* In Europe you cannot patent software - because you cannot patent logic. Sometimes software-patents are granted because the patent system is dysfunctional but these patents get revoked when challenged.
* I doubt you can even defend a "software-patent" in America if challenged.
* RedHat is weakening its position of Fedora (and of Linux) historically by similar decisions. Fedora is working well on desktops and laptops. But it is not acceptable for end-users to add extra repositories from RPMFUSION to get basic features working. The success of Canonicals Ubuntu is building up on this.
* They're not removing it for Fedora 36. Removing features is evil. But if Fedora is certain about their point-of-view they had to remove it, too.

And now Qualcomm tries to attack AV1:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33638975

I think someone within the AOM needs to tell Qualcomm in polite words that another decade of missing hardware-acceleration and patent-trolling is not acceptable.

If you're worried about software-patents. I recommend moving the legal domicile and hosting servers to Europe. I'm sorry America but your mistake.…

> Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.

Competition in this space has been everything except healthy. Wayland people have been essentially sabotaging X11 development.

Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure: https://linuxiac.com/xlibre-xserver-project-plans-revival-of-x11/

> In a dramatic turn of events, Red Hat employees banned developer Enrico Weigelt from the freedesktop.org infrastructure. Weigelt’s account, repositories, tickets, and merge requests (more than 140) associated with the Xorg project were also abruptly deleted. As a result of these actions, in a message titled “History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org,”.

(more in the link).

As somebody that has a functioning desktop environment (XFCE) and that doesn't bother much with new stuff, this is incredibly annoying, as the Wayland people have been breaking the linux desktop for everybody while pushing for incomplete alternatives (case in point: another comment to this same thread: wayland breaks accessibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824341 - they should have first developed it AND THEN push for it but no, they had to push incomplete and non functional garbage down everybody's throat).

I'm not really against Wayland per se, I'm against the…

Canonical keeps doing stupid, anti-user, anti-community stuff constantly, to the point that many people consider them to be the Microsoft of the Linux world.

For instance, not long ago, they were including ads/Amazon results in the Apps menu[1], similar to what Microsoft did with the Start menu. They also keep sneaking in suggestions (aka ads) for their Ubuntu Pro subscription in various places like the MOTD, or when you run apt[2], which isn't cool.

Most recently, the biggest annoyance is with the way they've been aggressively pushing their Snap store, to the point of even hijacking regular "apt install" commands - normally, you'd expect an "apt install" to fetch a regular .deb from the distro's repos, but they silently hijack the command to fetch apps from their Snap store instead[3]. Now, you may think that normal, non-technical users don't need to care about Snaps - and you'd be right, if they actually worked well. Snaps are slow and buggy and have been a constant source of pain for many users[4].

A major issue is with how buggy Ubuntu has become, especially OS upgrades, which may result in anything from minor issues like broken shortcuts, to complete breakage[5]. This might lead you to think that it's better to do a fresh install, but of late, new ISO releases have been incredibly buggy - like the 24.04 LTS installer, which kept crashing for many users[6] - and considering that LTS is supposed to be the super-stable version, that is not a good user…

Ugh, here we go.

Not all that stable: honestly an outright lie. Windows is stable. Linux is stable. Mac is stable. They’re all fine.

Ads for Apple products: they absolutely can be disabled and never come up after the first time they’re dismissed. By the way, not all Linux is non-commercial and the most popular distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat are commercial distributions.

https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-placing-ads/

I think the parent comment to yours was saying “more standard” in the sense that more software (especially commercial software) knows what to do with a Mac and works well with it. There are a whole bunch of commercial applications that have a Mac and Windows version but no Linux version.

macOS is also only one distribution while there are hundreds of flavors of Linux. If you’re on a Mac then someone targeting your platform knows what components you have. People who make accessories consider your existence and test their products with your platform.

Finally, most people aren’t web developers. But even if they were, I would argue that making your workstation exactly match the production server environment isn’t going to work that well even if you’re on a Linux desktop and is probably the wrong approach anyway. If I’m using an Arch Linux workstation and my application is running on Amazon EKS backed by Amazon Linux, there’s no possible way to make my container environment perfectly match the production technology.

These problems exist because Wayland’s design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows and macOS have relied on for decades—things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight.

We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues.

For now, if you need to use KiCad on Linux, use X11.

Can totally understand their position. I've developed cross-platform applications and it was enough work without the extra headache they describe Wayland brings.

I've been thinking about ditching Windows as my primary OS for some years, but Wayland has been really detrimental to the Linux desktop. Over a decade later and it's still not production ready, at least in my tests. Yet X11 is dying it seems, with GNOME and KDE dropping support soon[1][2].

From where I stand, the intentional fragmentation of the ecosystem seems like an especially poor decision.

[1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/05/gnome-dropping-x11-support-ubuntu-impact

[2]: https://linuxiac.com/kde-x11-support-to-continue-until-plasma-7/

> much more tooling available

Most of which is barely maintained and low quality.

For example, just recently:

https://linuxiac.com/libxml2-becomes-officially-unmaintained/

But even before it became officially unmaintained, it was already quite unloved, and it's one of the most used xml library.

We are not in the peak Java/J2EE era anymore. Pretty much nobody is going to willingly work on the foundations unless they're getting paid because the majority absolutely loathes XML and would not see maintaining XML libs as fun, and guess what, they're not? xslt also got removed from web browsers because nobody wants to maintain those libraries. And corporations like Google don't want to pay a dev for those either.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/deprecating-xslt

Meanwhile the tooling around JSON is as healthy as it's ever been, with very efficient implementations in most common programming languages and multiple SIMD impls in C, C++, Rust etc. People actually want to work on this.