Qt hasn't been terrible in terms of upgradeability between major versions for many use cases, but Krita got the short end of the stick.
Krita's scope and architecture requires both cross-platform compatibility and deep integration with the OS. For the latter, they need some degree of going past Qt's cross-platform abstractions, and Qt happens to have made some substantial changes to the way they build on the platform's graphics APIs.
As long as you're sticking with Qt's cross-platform API, you're good; if you ignore it and go full OpenGL or Vulkan for all UI, you're good; it's when you try to mix both that things get hairy.
He added an edit that the tablet software in Plasma 6 still works as it did before when run in X11. Only if you switch to Wayland, or your distro does it for you by removing X11 packages, will you get the (for the time being) less capable version.
Imagine you have a portable laptop that works for 95% of all your use cases except those days when you need a cluster of GPUs training a ML model or doing some large-scale scientific calculation.
Imagine having a fridge that isn't cold enough for storing ice cream and frozen veggies.
And yes, none of my shoes are even remotely close to covering 95% of floors. Some are good for hiking, some are good for running, some are warm in the winter.
The issue is not the lack of 100% coverage. The issue is that there is no sufficiently appealing option for a large number of people to get access to the 5% of cases when you do need it. Apparently rentals and other sharing options aren't quite up to snuff, so everybody overprovisions like crazy.
It's not exactly irrational though. Swinging back to car rental companies, they will overbook their vehicle fleets in order to maximize the amount of time that they're out generating revenue. Even if you prepay a reservation, it's no guarantee you will get a car.
It gets awful stressful awful quick when you have to deal with availability uncertainty and other things depend on it.
Those items are all vastly cheaper than a car. When shoes were expensive relative to what the average family could afford, families bought for quality and longevity, because they would need to last for years at a time, and most people only had a single pair.
A car is just a fundamentally different product to a set of shoes. If cars ever get to the point where the cost of one is trivial for the average person, we'll probably see the kind of specialization you see in other cheaper products. Also note, we can see pressure in the opposite direction for phones. Phones have become more expensive as they become more general purpose.
If we're going to ignore the "official" meaning of open source, then let's take a step back to consider why open source is worth supporting in the first place.
Open source guarantees to me, the user, that competition among vendors will be possible and fair in the future. This is exactly the point that many "fake OSS" licenses try to take away. Okay, maybe it's possible to fork for personal on-prem use, but god forbid someone creates a competing hosted solution that gives any customer more choice. Furthermore, these pieces of software are fucked the day that the company folds, or gets acquired by a malevolent buyer.
Open source guarantees a baseline level of respect towards me, the end user. By letting anyone fork a project that's gone too far in the wrong direction, I know that my software will continue working in the short run and of it's important enough, a competing alternative will emerge that continues without one-sided money or data grabs.
There's nothing inherently wrong with having someone from Microsoft or Google work on open source software, or any VC-funded company that will without fail turn against their users sooner or later. However, if a controlling majority of developers is employed this way, it provides an opportunity for what elsewhere is known as regulatory capture. If Microsoft's goal is to make people dependent on proprietary GitLab and VS Code Marketplace offerings, and Google's goal is to provide the greatest possible amount of ads and tracking to the largest possible user base, it does not matter if the software is open source or not. The end result is the same, I'm left without viable alternatives and big business gets to do with us whatever the hell they please.
Especially when this software becomes ubiquitous and entrenched, paying developers to work on company-controlled OSS instead of community-driven, user-respecting OSS is a net negative for everyone in the long run.
I'm only interested in OSS in so far as it protects my interests as an end user, and/or our common interests as a society, now and in the future. The collaborative aspect is nice, but that's not the reason that we should ask for better compensation for maintainers.
The "Open Source" label as such is indeed meaningless per se, and it doesn't always protect me either, as seen with BSD+MIT software allowing cryptographically-enabled control of devices that I nominally own, or GPL being useless when there is no actual distribution of software involved. That said, I have yet to see a case of non-OSI "open source" that doesn't try to tilt the playing field in biased, controlling and long-term unsustainable or user-hostile ways.
If you can't build a business on a level playing field, perhaps it's in everyone's interest that your business and software dies, or retreats into lower-intensity hobbyist maintainership, instead of leading everyone into a hard dependency on your oh so well-intended monetization of originally useful software. Then at least someone else can take a shot at doing it better.
Those are some pretty twisted reasons to support open source. First of all, you are not a "user" if you use open source. You are an owner. Open source gives you the freedom to control the development process of the software. It sounds like what you want is the freedom to have other people serving you. Also, an inventor who chooses to reserve some rights to control their invention is not acting anti-competitively. You're disagreeing with both law and morality by thinking that. You are not entitled to anything. Open source usually happens because the inventor has nothing to gain from exerting personal control through legal means over their invention. So what it in effect does, is it gives you the power to take control and participate in its development, as an equal, rather than a mere consumer. You can't walk into open source with the consumer mindset because that's just not how things work. Companies like Microsoft that retain full control over their software will break their backs to serve you, because they're the only ones who can. But you can't expect that kind of service from people who are simply trying to give you the DIY tools to do it yourself.
I am an owner if I can exercise control over the software at hand. That's entirely my point - there is open source that a rando like me can hop in and improve, sometimes requiring difficult discussions about how to go about it exactly, but always with the experience of the user as a priority. (User can be an end user, but also a developer who's using an open source library/framework.)
And then there's "open source" where the code is accessible but the user experience takes a backseat to corporate interests, CLA requirements provide a one-sided transfer of copyrights, hobbyist contributions are systematically steamrolled by optimizing build pipelines and development processes for internal company use, and large-scale directions are decided in a private meeting room without involving community contributors.
If an inventor reserves some rights to control their invention for their own benefit, I have no problem with that. There's plenty of commercial software out there, people are working hard to provide value to customers, and I've been part of this system too.
Where I take issue is when we ask for special treatment of "open source" whose main purpose is to benefit commercial entities in doing business. Companies should figure out on their own how to keep their mission-critical software alive, that's their business. If Django suffers because lots of profitable outfits can't figure out a way to finance what they build upon, let them eat dust. They'll figure it out eventually when their services start falling behind on all fronts.
As a charitable coder, I'm going to invest my time into providing value for end users, not companies. That's the kind of open source we as a community/society should focus on supporting and financing. Imho.
You should be supporting and financing open source that elevates knowledge.
Knowledge is the resource that open source distributes which folks fight to control. It's like the fruit you'd grow on a farm. You could argue about whether or not the fruit should be distributed more to the city folk or the country folk, or ask questions about how much money the farm is making, but I'd say you should be focusing on getting the farm to grow more fruit, since that's the only way to be sure everyone becomes richer as a result.
Scientists do a great job discovering knowledge, but open source is what makes it useful and able to be used. Any open source project that's helping to elevate know-how is a project worth supporting.
Inflation isn't great for people with stocks, and high interest rates are the main thing that can apply downward pressure to housing prices.
People with lots of debt have it rough right now. The little guy with no house or stocks, but no debt, however, has more of a chance to catch up when hard-earned assets depreciate via inflation and high interest.
If you had lots of debt and lots of assets even if in 2020 that was a net zero of you made it to 2022 you became insanely rich in the last couple years
Doesn't matter it still goes up, the mortgage note you owe 75000 2003 dollars would cost you 126000 now. Because while it's true in 2003 you made 35000, and now you make about 60000, you're still slightly ahead.
KDE is not going Wayland only with the upcoming Plasma 6.0. It's merely switching the default selection, while continuing to support X11 for much longer (no end date announced at this point).
I agree with the remainder of the parent comment, and prominent distributions dropping X11 in 2024 will definitely accelerate the quest for the last bunch of Wayland features that common users feel on a day-to-day basis.
This angle makes me think that we're going about the whole inheritance tax thing the wrong way.
It's not the parent's estate that should be taxed. They have indeed earned all the money fair and square, and should be able to pass it on as they see fit.
Instead, let's think about a tax on receiving inheritances. Limiting the money hose where the inequality actually happens, at the person that hasn't worked for the money and through pure happenstance comes into riches while others are not getting remotely equal opportunities. That person should be the one to consider when proposing an inheritance tax.
Maybe a lifetime tax-free limit on receiving inheritances, cumulatively, from any source.
[Edit: This way, we can also elegantly solve the "can't pass down the family business" problem: Allow the inheritance tax to be paid in long-term installments by the recipient, with interest, allowing the inheriting child to keep the asset but make them work for part of the value they got out of it. Remaining tax debt at the time of the child's death would be due immediately at the time of their own death.]
My big concern with large companies is cross-selling. For the sake of argument, let's assume that Google rightfully won the Internet, Apple rightfully won smartphones, Microsoft rightfully (?) won operating systems, etc.
All of them tried, competition was hot, the market picked a winner.
But what's next is a market distortion. Google uses their front page to push Chrome over Firefox, Apple doesn't care to make any of their other devices (e.g. Watch, HomePod) interoperate with other platforms, Microsoft packs Windows with ads for Office 365, OneDrive, and so on. All of Big Tech is perpetually obsessed with owning platforms as opposed to products, because once you control a platform, it gives you the leverage/"moat" to continue profiting without the corresponding investment into competing fairly. Thriving competition would be to have to compete independently in each market, rather than winning one and then extending that win to other markets by tilting the playing field.
Activision Blizzard falls nicely into this category as it's explicitly designed to gain an edge over Sony in gaming. Cloud gaming or not, it's clear to everyone that the general idea is improve the standing of Xbox products and Windows PCs by using the leverage of CoD as an existing market winner. As opposed to making the platform compete on its own terms. That's a market distortion.
The fact that large companies put large amounts of resources into startups and developing new markets doesn't mean that they compete fairly, or that it's a better outcome for society/consumers than an alternative reality where each product by itself would compete on its own merits, and companies could win markets independently rather than having to sell to existing market leaders for extra leverage.
It seems like on PC one would want to use Opus instead of the older MP3 or Ogg Vorbis. It has a number of performance-related improvements in addition to better audio per bitrate, although the higher-quality codec out of its two internal modes is still conceptually similar to MP3 & Co. so I figure it wouldn't necessarily solve all performance issues either.
I haven't really spent much time on simulation games past SimCity 2000, but I find this odd. Even the most winsome cities and countries in the world are struggling.
Instead of scenarios or AI, why wouldn't it be the case that success invites more problems? You've got issues with immigration happening too rapidly for the population's taste, inflation devalues your accumulated resources at a more rapid pace, essential workers' pay isn't keeping up with FAANG, inequality is rampant, lots of homeless druggies appreciating your shelter & food bank infrastructure but locals are fed up, and also the next level up in government works against you out of envy or simple lack of appreciation for you contribution to the public purse. Power structures crumble because citizens get lazy and entitled, not knowing how good they have it, populism and self-interest rule the day.
Design success as the enemy of success, and you never run out of issues to solve. That said, it would be nice to see the winning endgame in real life for a change.
I'm sure you could design it in a way that people wouldn't mind. Most games get harder as you succeed at them. Rimworld is a builder game that does it. And not just through increased complexity, but by making the environment more hostile.
Having a dynamic environment is one of the things that I've long wanted city sims to have. SimCity always had disasters, which is in the same vein, but they always felt like an afterthought (or a joke, in the case of alien or monster attacks). City simulations pretend to be serious flaw toys, so let me deal with a recession (or even a boom), or a dioxine contamination, or civil unrest. Not with a minigame, but let me deal with the city management aspects of those events.
Krita's scope and architecture requires both cross-platform compatibility and deep integration with the OS. For the latter, they need some degree of going past Qt's cross-platform abstractions, and Qt happens to have made some substantial changes to the way they build on the platform's graphics APIs.
As long as you're sticking with Qt's cross-platform API, you're good; if you ignore it and go full OpenGL or Vulkan for all UI, you're good; it's when you try to mix both that things get hairy.