Yeah, I looked into ARM or RISC-V options for a NAS, but ended up going with x86. Upstream Linux support is just a hard requirement for me. As the author points out, the support that you get from the SBC manufacturers is lacking at best.
Rust implies only 1 thing, and that’s no memory leaks, assuming you don’t use “unsafe” code. It’s still very much vulnerable to logic bugs and has the same performance as c (GNOME) and c++ (KDE).
Rust actually doesn’t guarantee that there are no memory leaks. I think the more important memory safety improvements are regarding use after free, out-of-bounds accesses, null pointer issues, and double free problems.
For me, it’s mostly interesting because it brings automatic tiling to a desktop environment. System76 has previously implemented this as an extension for Gnome, but they haven’t been too happy with that approach.
I think would also be good for the Linux Desktop community to have more than 2 strong desktop environments. Hopefully this would incentivize app developers to account for more than just a singe DE.
Join the Debian Trixie upgrade fun today :) https://micronews.debian.org/
Gnome and KDE are not doing the same thing.
KDE will continue to offer an X11 session for the time being:
Current status: Plasma’s X11 session continues to be maintained.
https://pointieststick.com/2025/06/21/about-plasmas-x11-session/
Gnome will disable the X11 session in the next release and then remove the code:
The most likely scenario is that all the X11 session code stays disabled by default for 49 with a planned removal for GNOME 50.
https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/08/the-x11-session-removal/
I understood Matthew’s position as “this should be discussed in the Workstation WG first”, not as a “no”:
in favor of the process outlined above (tl;dr: talk to the Workstation WG, and if that does not come to a satisfying outcome, file a Council ticket for next possibilities).
It also seemed more likely that they would promote KDE without demoting Gnome.
But was there a follow-up on that (e.g. in the Workstation WG)?
Ubuntu LTS (and therefore Linux Mint) gets updated graphics drivers between releases, so the situation is not too bad. I’d say it’s good enough for most people. You only really have an issue if you want to buy a brand-new AMD/Intel GPU.
For comparison, Debian 13 (and LMDE) currently ships the Nvida 550 driver, while Ubuntu 24.04 ships the 580 driver.