Have you tried COSMIC yet? Maybe PopOS is worth a shot.

Some packages are a bit old at the moment but they have a release coming in April / May that will bring them right up to date.

Perhaps LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is worth a look as well.

Both options are similar in that they take a very stable distro base and layer on a quite up-to-date desktop.

They also feature clear direction and a predicable release schedule.

Mint or Fedora require no more command line than Windows does.

I never liked KDE. I used it before there was GNOME but I used GNOME 2 for years and Cinnamon or XFCE after that.

I probably tried KDE4 once and KDE5 a couple times. Not for me. But I have used KDE a lot since Plasma 6. I have to agree with you. They are doing a great job. It is probably the best environment for Wayland.

I also use COSMIC a bit and Niri is my favourite environment. But I do seem to be using Plasma 6 a lot. It is sitting in front of me now.

I would agree with you. That said, bad experiences with things like PPA’s are one the reasons people reach for immutable distros.

I think as soon as you start adding PPA’s to your system, you should consider a distro with a larger repository. But that is just my opinion.

Flatpak wins because we need one “Linux-wide” solution—one universal package format—and it was the first.

Distrobox can make any package format work on any distro if that is what you want.

My favourite package manager is APK v3 but the distros that use it do not have big repositories. So I end up using an APK host with Pacman / Yay running in a Distrobox.

This idiot has been writing articles over there for decades. He has always been pro Linux which is nice. Unfortunately, he has also always been an idiot.

Yes, they do, via the mintupgrade tool.

Not sure why the downvote, other than that they specified “versioned” (not rolling).

All rolling distros obviously auto-upgrade by definition.

Our first “Linux put me in the hospital” story of 2026!

It may be that they are picking geographically close mirrors that are massively slower. The difference between connecting to a very remote mirror can be up to a couple hundred milliseconds latency and a few percent in bandwidth due to “the Internet” itself.

But the mirrors themselves can vary massively in performance. First, it may be older hardware that gets more easily overwhelmed. But it may also be on a connection with far less bandwidth. If that outgoing bandwidth is being shared across many users, you may not be getting much of it.

I am fortunate enough that the speed of the package manager itself would make a bigger difference.

But connecting to a slow mirror can be a killer so, If that was a frequent problem for me, it would absolutely factor into my decision.

I guess the other factor is how often you are updating. For a rolling distro, it would be essential.

On Debian Stable, I would care a lot less. Just let it update overnight once in a while.

Why do you say that it “seems to work”?

If it is no longer visible on the network, are you sure it is still booting successfully?

I have never used dropbear but, if it is promoting for a password, doesn’t that mean the system has connected over the network successfully?

I could see MATE going Wayland only before XFCE does. They are a “traditional” desktop but not committed to old tech in general. Their whole system has already been ported to Wayland when used with a compositor like Wayfire or LabWC. As a small project, they may not want to maintain both longer term.

Lots of MATE users on other UNIX systems though. Not just BSD but Solaris and such. So, who knows.

XFCE is building libraries to make supporting both longer term easier. So, they should support X11 for a long time. We will see what happens if GTK5 is Wayland only.

Trinity Desktop is probably stuck on X11.

And most X11 window managers will remain X11 window managers forever. The only reason Sway exists is because i3 is not moving. There is Wayland Maker instead of WimdowMsker and DWL instead of DWM. This list goes on. What non-DE x11 window manager is porting to Wayland? I cannot think of one.

But Plasma is not ditching X for a year or more. And many distros will ship the X version far longer. The freaking out seems more like a political statement than a pragmatic requirement at this point.

If Debian Forky ships Plasma with X11 support in 2027 (and I bet it does), the first version of Debian Stable to ship Wayland-only Plasma will be Debian 15 in 2029/2030. Many, maybe most, never-Waylanders will have migrated to Wayland by then.

And quite a dishonest readme at that. All the “not natively supported” entries for things designed to work with XDG desktop portals are hilarious.

This is obviously more of a political statement than anything else. I would not expect much from it.

I will bet the full dollar that Trinity never gets ported to Wayland.

They would have to port it to a version of Qt that supports Wayland. If they were ever going to do that, they would have done it by now.

MATE (GNOME2) ported from GTK2 to GTK3 so most of MATE works on Wayland today. You can use all the bits with a different Wayland compositor. And I think they are making their own.

But Trinity maintains their own fork of Qt3. Bringing that up to Qt6 or adding Wayland to Qt3 would be a big project. I do not see either happening.

There are few Wayland only apps today. But as the percentage of Linux desktop users on Wayland goes over 80 percent, that will change.

And today, GUI toolkits and desktop environments have to limit features to those that will work in both environments. But not for long.

My guess is that it will be totally impractical to use an X11 only desktop 3 years from now. 5 for sure. In fact, I bet few people will even have Xwayland installed 5 years from now. To run what? Xfig? Netscape?

But certainly it will still be possible to run an X server. Xorg itself will still probably run fine. It already uses KMS and DRI from the kernel and those may not change much. And I am sure at least a few zealots will still be pushing XLibre a decade from now. And Wayback will almost certainly let you run an X11 desktop for many, many years to come for those “legacy use cases” you talk about. Like running CDE for a couple of hours.

Probably the most interesting development has been Phoenix. They have floated the idea of having an X11 first environment (eg. using an X11 window manager) that can run Wayland apps too. If that actually happens, I am sure it will find some fans. If you have spent 15 years fine-tuning your FVWM or Xmonad config, you won’t want to give it up.

It will be interesting to see where the BSD world goes with all of this. I think FreeBSD will go Wayland. But NetBSD and OpenBSD could be x11 holdouts. But the Wayland-only app problem will impact everyone. Time will tell.

Wayland has improved a lot in the last few years. And yes, there are and have been differences in hardware.

I think the biggest difference is likely to be software though. Primarily in two ways.

First, a lot of people are using older software. Not to pick on Debian but it is a good example. A Debian Stable user may be using NVIDIA drivers that are literally years older than what an Arch user is using. Paired with Wayland compositors and XDG portals that are older as well. So when they talk about Wayland (even today), they are really describing the experience from years ago. Alma Linux probably falls on this camp.

Second, what use cases are well supported on Wayland still varies from compositor to compositor. Somebody using Plasma 6 may experience that pretty much everything just works. Somebody using Sway may find that some uses cases are still immature.

Put these together and you have a lot of NVIDIA on Debian people telling you things don’t work and a lot of AMD on Fedora people wondering what they are talking about.

Today, Wayland and Xorg are more “different” than better or worse. If you are happy with Wayland, migrating to Xorg would probably feel like a real step back and there would be all kinds of issues and deficiencies. But, for some, the reverse can still be true. Wayland still has a few gaps.

Finally, they ARE different. Which means that if you insist on trying to make Wayland work exactly like X11, it is easy to make it seem like it is not working, even if Wayland can do exactly what you need in some slightly different way.

The important thing to acknowledge though is that more than half of Linux desktop users run Wayland now. And the majority of new users start in Wayland and will never switch. So X11 is the weird one now. And while Xorg is about as good as it is ever going to be, Wayland gets better every day.

As soon as an article starts by telling you that Wayland is 18 years old, you know where it is going to go. Yes, the very beginning of the Wayland experiment started long ago but it was not something anybody was expected to use most of that time.

The very first Wayland-only desktop environment ever, COSMIC, launched just last month. Should I write an article about how amazing Wayland is despite being so new?

A more neutral view might be to use Sway itself as a benchmark as it was one of the earliest Wayland compositors. The Sway project is less than 10 years old. The most complete Wayland environment available today, KDE Plasma, started to experiment with Wayland around then as well.

But Wayland has only really come into its own in the last 5 years with remaining edge cases regularly being addressed over the last two.

And we are now in a place where Wayland works for most people. The edge cases that remain are largely more exotic, like this guys 8K monitor. It would be dishonest to pretend Wayland’s evolution has been rapid. It has largely been dysfunctional. And real gaps remain. But it is already superior to X11 in many ways and the list of remaining use cases not well addressed continues to drop.

Yes, Wayland does a lot of stuff better than X11.

A Linux desktop user that started in Wayland a couple of years ago would be able to write a similarly negative article about Xorg if they tried to switch to it. The two systems are different. Neither is absolutely better than the other today. But Wayland is improving and Xorg is not.

And more than half of Linux desktop users run Wayland now. And 4 out of 5 new Linux desktop users start on Wayland and never switch. Linux is a Wayland first OS. So, when articles like this complain about how long it would take to reconfigure their systems for Wayland, they miss an important point. The Wayland way is the “correct” way now, or at least the most common way. The X11 config is the weird one.

And one of the things Wayland does better is run Wayland apps. The foot terminal mentioned in this article cannot be run on X11 at all. It is Wayland only. All of the apps an X user tries on Wayland will at least run. Not so the other way around.

When GNOME and KDE shed their X11 compatibility, they will be able to more freely innovate Wayland only features. As that starts to happen, it will become more normal to create Wayland only applications. This won’t be a problem as 80 percent or more of Linux desktop uses will be using Wayland-only desktop environments.

And that is what will ultimately doom X11. It will become impractical to run and X server instead of Wayland due to the important Wayland apps that cannot run on such a desktop.

Anyway, it was a well written article and mostly fair. It will be very interesting to see how the set of requirements fares 1 - 2 years from now. GNOME and KDE will be Wayland only. COSMIC will have matured. Wayland compositors will have standardized a bit.

I suspect that things will be looking very nice.

FreeBSD has made a real laptop push recently and 15.1 is supposed to offer KDE out of the box.

Depending on your hardware, it is really viable now.