That's not even the most recent iteration, there's also Deskflow now which is maintained by the main Synergy developer and a very active independent dev. Works fine on Wayland afaik. Also has a wiki page with the history of all the forks!
> To put a positive conspiratorial spin on the recent Wayland push: maybe they think that taking away the option to fall back to X11 will finally get enough eyes on Wayland to fix its remaining issues.
Yes, and I also think it's important to focus on that part in particular: X11 is not a feature, it's not a user story, it's an implementation detail of the desktop environment / window manager.
There are certainly historical architectural choices that imply many aspects of what X11 can or can't do for the user, likewise with desktops' implementation of the Wayland protocol. The differences between these approaches is real, and substantial.
But in the end, X11 is not a cause unto its own. It's a component in service of the user experience at large. People criticize the removal of X11 support either because their use cases have been affected in some inconvenient way, or because they're afraid of future consequences one way or another.
It's important that desktop environments work on providing the features/UX/quality that users need and expect. It's also important that users tell their DE developers what their needs are, in terms of what problems they are trying to solve, not in terms of which components to use underneath. Choice of component stack is a developer issue and should remain this way.
In the end, the DEs/WMs that solve their users' problems to a high degree of satisfaction are the ones who will retain and gain the most users. Approaches will differ across the Linux desktop space regarding what problems to solve specifically, which problems to prioritize, and how best to implement solutions for them. Dependencies like X11 shape the ultimate user experience one way or another, in terms of features, constraints, development effort, and continuity.
And so do many other implementation choices that need to be made or revised along the way. Ideally most users will end up with DEs/WMs whose development philosophy is aligned with their personal priorities. Friendly bug reporters can help out with the awareness part at least :)
> It's also important that users tell their DE developers what their needs are
It's further important that relevant developers actually listen rather than ignoring, dismissing, or saying (and I quote!) "...Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore."
Free books for you as an individual, not free for the library and the city backing it. What's in your library still ends up paying authors (and their publishers).
A not-so-insignificant number of FOSS developers are well able to make quality UIs, but decide to charge for their more polished creations.
Between having to make a living somehow, and not reaping a whole lot of other personal benefits from open source audio development, it takes a very special kind of person to publish these contributions in the first place. Once they're published, generally with its UI defined in code by a developer person, they're not necessarily easy for a designer to edit.
Nor is there much of a steady community around most of the plugins. So many are "publish, feature-complete enough, move on" kind of projects.
As always, be the change you want to see in the world.
With Zynthian OS up and running, the full list of plugins shows in its webconf page, it's so long that they have to hide basically most of the plugins from the main on-device UI.
Roughly speaking, if it's open source, most likely it will work. If it's proprietary, assume that only Pianoteq and a small number of u-he plugins will work. Most commercial products with binary-only distribution don't feel like RPi devices are a large enough market for them to build binaries for it. Even if they otherwise offer ARM builds for Apple Silicon and Linux builds for x86.
The Steam client has to restart in order to pick up the newly added external titles, at least last time I tried. In gaming mode, restarting the client means restarting the system, which is ever so slightly annoying.
Apart from that though, it works just fine on the Steam Deck.
I just tried it today actually - I just had to exit the steam deck UI mode, enter desktop mode, add them with Heroic, and then restart the deck UI mode from the desktop shortcut and it worked!
It's a little more nuanced than that. Software and gained freedoms survive not because they exist, but because they are being actively maintained. If your original, never-taken-away software does not get continually maintained, then:
* It will slowly go stale, for example, it may not get ported to newer, increasingly expected desktop APIs.
* It will lose users to competing software (such as your proprietary fork) which are better maintained.
As a result, it loses its relevance and utility over time. People that never update their systems can continue using it as they always have, assuming no online-only restrictions or time-limited licenses. But to new use cases and new users, the open software is now less desirable and the proprietary fork accumulates ever more power to screw over people with anti-consumer moves. Regulators ignore the open variant due to its niche marketshare, increasing the likelihood of things going south.
Harm can be done to people who don't have alternatives. In order to have alternatives, you need either a functioning free market or a working, relevant, sufficiently usable product that can be forked if worse comes to worst. Free software can of course help in establishing a free market, it isn't one or the other.
If a proprietary product takes over from one controlled by the community, much of the time it's not a problem. It can be replaced or done without.
If a proprietary platform takes over from one controlled by the community, something that determines not only how you go about your business but what other people expect from you, everyone gets harmed. The problem with a lot of proprietary software is that every company and their dog wants their product to become a platform and reshape the market to discourage alternatives.
MIT by itself does no harm. If it works like LLVM and everyone contributes because it makes more sense than developing a closed-off platform, then great! If it helps to bootstrap a proprietary market leader while the originally useful open original shrivels away into irrelevance, not as great.
https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow
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