I appreciate the information, and I’m willing to give it a shot again when I next need to do a distro switch or a new installation, but until now my experiences with Wayland have basically been a stream of broken things over several days as I try to reestablish my workflow in a new desktop environment. The time it all goes successfully is the time I’ll be sold.

Like I said, I use Linux in my classroom, and I heavily use global shortcut keys set via script for individual lessons, with fullscreen opening of applications that don’t have automatic support and shortcut key based window switching all without mouse input to create a seamless presentation for my students.

Global shortcuts and wmctrl, which form the critical backbones of this system, simply don’t work in Wayland.

And to suggest it’s just a perfect transition is wrong. I don’t use Steam Link, but if I did? Doesn’t work in Wayland. Everyone constantly bemoans that applications should be rewritten for Wayland, but one of Linux’s advantages is eternal backwards compatibility so software can actually be FINISHED.

Wayland isn’t the kernel and it shouldn’t be held to the standard of the Linux kernel, but do you remember when Linus Torvalds publicly screamed at and berated a developer for a change to the kernel that broke a userspace application and then having the sheer GALL to suggest the application developer was at fault? Wayland evangelists could stand to be a little more understanding that people don’t like it when you break functional userspace applications, force developers to work on stuff that is FINISHED to get it working again, and then blame them for not getting on board with your changes. You know who does that? Google.

Look, Wayland works for you and that’s fantastic. Use whatever you like. Linux is Linux and one of the most beautiful points of Linux is freedom of choice. What I take exception to is the people in this thread who are acting like anybody who isn’t on Wayland is crazy and insisting there’s no good reason to still be on X11 just because they personally don’t understand why someone would need features they need. Anyone expounding that “Wayland is a 1 to 1 replacement for X11 and superior in every way!” is either being intentionally disingenous or a cultist. You know who insists users are wrong for having their own use cases and workflow and wants them to change to their preferred system because THEY don’t think the other use cases matter? Microsoft.

I’ll be happy to make the switch to Wayland… when I do a system install or update and it happens invisibly and I don’t suddenly have to wonder why all of my custom scripts no longer work.

It’s not that I have issues - it works just fine in the domain it’s designed for. It’s that the Wayland system does not provide feature parity with X11. I make extensive use of window manipulation using xdotool and wmctrl for my daily use case, and those are both unsupported on Wayland. It’s a fine system for users whose use case fit with its design. It is not a feature complete replacement for X11.

I’ll never make the claim that X11 is perfect, but my use case requires features that are either not built into Wayland yet or simply won’t be built into it in the future.

I’m sure it’s a fine product, but asking me to change my workflow to use it is a non-starter. When it reaches feature complete support of X11 functionality, I’ll consider changing.

Just off the top of my head, Linux Mint, which I know because Waydroid is incompatible with the machines I use in my classrooms. Even if it were compatible, unless the lack of global hotkeys has been addressed changing is a non-starter.

That’s a fair point, and it’s the Waydroid team’s unquestioned right to use whatever technologies they want to build their software on.

But just throwing it out as a solution to a general Linux question when there’s a VERY good chance it’s incompatible with major distros is omitting critical information.

It saddens me to see you being downvoted by the Wayland evangelists when it is CLEARLY not a (EDIT: feature complete) replacement for X11 yet. If I could upvote you twice, I would.

Major, MAJOR caveat here.

You’ve said that, but this doesn’t seem to be a copyright issue. As far as I know, Ryujinx used NONE of Nintendo’s proprietary material whatsoever. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

What I’m seeing isn’t an IP issue at all - it’s simple strong-arming.

The initial argument that started all of this chain was a statement that Nintendo was understandable in their legal action, and I took and STILL take issue with that.

“They are absolutely within their rights to approach the developers of Ryujinx and threaten to sue them.”

While this is TECHNICALLY true in the most literal sense of the word, it carries the implication that there is something justifiable at some level about the actions they’ve taken.

My response is it’s correct in only the most pedantic sense, THIS is the element I find egregious for how much it understates just how disgusting Nintendo’s actions are. This is nothing more than a mafia shakedown with lawyers instead of grunts, and to play it down like that is improper.

IP, copyright, shutting down streamers… all of this is a totally separate issue, and all of THAT activity is actually SUPPORTED by law.

Shutting down Ryujinx is on a massively different level. It’s neither a copyright issue OR a legality issue. It’s a direct strong-arming contrary to established law, and THAT is what this thread is about. There are other articles to discuss IP and content creators, which are a completely different issue with different repercussions.

And Elon Musk was “legally in the clear” to sue a trade group into non-existence over the idea that companies deciding to boycott his site independently was collusion.

I am objecting loudly and powerfully to “legally in the clear” being equated with “acceptable” or “within the spirit of the law.”

Make no mistake. As far as we know, this is only legally in the clear because the developers are unable to fight it. That does NOT make Nintendo’s action correct. By LAW the developers are in the right, they simply cannot afford to defend themselves. If your claim is that it is technically legal to threaten to sue anybody you want, you are correct and also terrifyingly shortsighted. Inability of someone to defend their rights for financial reasons is a miscarriage of justice. Given the options of smugly pointing out the technical situation or ranting about the injustice, I’ll take the latter.

Let’s put it another way… You’re absolutely right. Nintendo is LEGALLY in the right to bully someone into submission using the threat of a lawsuit they cannot afford with overwhelming money. The legal system can’t touch them.

But that means the ONLY place where Nintendo will EVER face ANY kind of consequences is in the court of public opinion, so why on EARTH would your take on the situation be, “Oh well… nothing we can do.” It’s not much, but it’s the ONLY lever you have, and to relinquish it is fatalistic, shortsighted, and overall inconceivable as a strategy.

This is a fair point. I just get so sick of seeing the constant erosion of individual rights in the technology space due to apathy and under reactions, and it’s a more or less constant, ongoing slide to the point where moments like this become absolutely infuriating.

Perhaps. But I see a lot of hand rubbing and “oh welling” from people when this is a legitimate moment for anger at the precedence this sets. I understand the urge to make it make sense, but the fact is people either tacitly accepting this activity as reasonable or arguing about the red herring of whether the source code is still available to sit and rot with nobody touching it but shady scam artists, not only moves the bar on what what Nintendo and other companies see they can get away with, it has a chilling effect on future preservation efforts among the constantly shrinking pool of people skilled enough in low level development to do this kind of work.

I guess my point is, I’m seeing very few voices that are sufficiently concerned or angry enough about this event considering the far reaching consequences it’s going to have.

We shouldn’t in ANY way be normalizing this activity, and our reaction shouldn’t be “Of COURSE they did this.” Although I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after we just watched Boeing murder a half dozen of its whistleblowers and the most people did was make a few memes. We’re living in a literal dystopia, apparently.

You’re incorrect. Creating an emulator is not illegal. Nintendo has the legal right to threaten to sue someone, but if you are threatening to sue for something that is not a crime, and you know that, and you do it anyway in the hopes of bankrupting them before the case settles, that’s not a legal proceeding, it’s extortion. I can threaten to sue you for cooking pancakes in your house, and while it’s technically ALLOWED for me to do that, it’s clearly and obviously not a case I would win, but if the threat of making your life hell is prominent enough, you might get forced into backing down, which is exactly what’s happening here.

They would absolutely NOT lose in court for creating an emulator. I cannot stress enough exactly how legal emulation is. It’s as legal as making your pancakes. The only way they would lose in court is if there is some EXTRA thing they’ve done that we don’t know about. If all they’ve done is create and distribute Ryujinx, there is absolutely NO way Nintendo would win a case in the US. This is settled law, and saying it isn’t doesn’t make it so, although it DOES embolden companies to bullshit developers with more bogus threats in the future.

They aren’t working within any rights. Emulator production is a legal right that Nintendo has neither the ability to bestow nor deny. It’s the founding legal rationale behind virtualization as a technology. This is the equivalent of someone holding a gun to your head and telling you to shut up - the forced relinquishing of your rights through threat of force, and it’s a little frightening to watch people suggest otherwise. This has played out in court and is settled law. Bleem! went BANKRUPT to secure a legal victory against SONY and establish that emulators are completely legal and there is no “gray area” about them, and you should be in less of a hurry to throw legal rights away because “Well, Nintendo said so…”

I gave you the benefit of the doubt that maybe I didn’t grasp what you said, but reading your reply it seems like I grasped it fine.

Here’s the thing. People use emulators for piracy. That is also COMPLETELY and totally irrelevant to the discussion. The right to developing emulators is well-established, and game preservation isn’t even the most important consequence. The right to developing emulators is what allows virtualization that forms the backbone of server architecture, as well as running legacy code from old architectures on modern hardware, alleviating the need for thousands of man hours in rewriting tried and tested code. 20 years in the future, when the IoTs stupidity litters millions of homes with inaccessible, useless plastic garbage, emulation of no longer supported control units will be a panacea.

Nintendo is totally free to not like the law, but it is the law, and this pressure to shut down these projects is a flagrant violation of the developers’ legal rights, which regardless of the morality of piracy is a disgusting flouting of the legal system.

People use guns to murder, yes. But whether you or I think it’s correct or not, the law does not hold gun makers liable for the things their users do with them. We can’t just DECIDE that there are exceptions to the law and begin prosecuting or acting as if they are liable. That requires either a new law or an interpretation by a court to set a precedent - not lawyers sending a cease and desist to Smith & Wesson. That is a slippery slope to an absolutely nightmarish dystopia.

There is no justifying this in a “Well, I can see why they did it…” sense any more than in a murder case. The law is clear. The established rights of the developers are clear. The right to make a Switch emulator is NOT Nintendo’s right to give or deny like a trademark dispute or the ability to make a fan game. They don’t GET a say. The right to make an emulator is explicitly YOURS by LAW. And a giant corporation has taken their money and used it to violate established rights with threat of bankruptcy in violation of that established law. If you believe in the rule of law, no matter what you think of piracy, that should be utterly haunting.

I can’t blame them for taking down that kind of software development.

Your not being able to blame them is completely irrelevant. Nintendo can not like stuff all it wants. The question is if it is LEGAL. If it is, and it is, your defense of their actions is a defense of the argument that they should be above the law because they don’t like something, and that’s an absolutely TERRIBLE position to take. You don’t need to white knight for Nintendo. They have more money than God and taking up their fights for them against your own rights as a consumer is so far beyond Stockholm Syndrome that I don’t think we even have a word for it yet.

And because these are never finished projects. People can rant and rave about cloning the git all day, but without active, knowledgeable developers with the knowledge of the original dev team, these projects are dead. It’s not about using the emulators as they exist today… it’s about continuing to keep them working going forward. Anything that releases in the last year or two of the Switch’s life is now at risk of being lost forever into Nintendo’s archives.

This works. I ran a linux distro in off hours on my work laptop for years this way.

Two reasons:

First, rather than just overseeing the most profitable game in the world, Sweeney tied his leadership at Epic to picking fights with Apple and Steam to try to muscle his way into a broader industry position. With how broken and barely functional the EGS is, it’s incredibly obvious there is no way he can muster a team to do ANYTHING like Proton, so his solution is to go full throttle into pretending Windows is fine and not a dependency with existential risk.

Second, the bread and butter of EGS is Fortnite, and the developers at Epic are apparently completely unable to engineer any kind of effective anti-cheat which doesn’t involve kernel level access. It is actually easier to save face by pretending the entire Linux ecosystem doesn’t matter than to officially support Linux and then have to explain why Fortnite isn’t available.

The ironic thing is, if he’d put the money the company wasted on exclusives and free giveaways into actual development, they could EASILY have solved all of these problems. It is fascinating, however, to watch Fortnite players dump literal billions of dollars into the company each year, just to watch it get flushed away into absolutely nothing.

Tim Sweeney (crying): “There’s no future in Linux gaming. No! Stop it! Stop enjoying the good thing that isn’t from me!!!”