Your post made me realize that troll links in general are going to be mystifying. Case in point, Arctic gave me a thumbnail without needing to click.

can we really trust a “black box” algorithm with our lives?

No. That’s why we have clinical trials.

Freddy Got Fingered

The Wild Robot Protects

Not quite as good as The Wild Robot and The Wild Robot Escapes, but the entire series is an excellent set of children’s novels.

How do you think we all learned linux?

There’s definitely compatibility issues with my printer… on Windows. I always have to send my documents to my linux laptop to print.

Never played Escape Velocity, but Endless Sky was fantastic. Both the main quest lines had fantastic stories, especially the first one.

Adaptation, because it’s more Nic Cage!

They are display server communication protocols. Essentially, the computer clients give the display server information, and then the display server processes that information and sends it to the screen. For example, a game might say, “The player is controlling a red guy with a hat and mustache” and the display server draws a Mario on the screen.

X Server is 40 years old. It’s tried and tested, but is not built on modern coding standards. For example, it has not kept up with modern security, allowing a bad actor to tell X to draw a bit of malicious code that tricks the display server into giving it control of other programs. For this reason, the developers of X are sunsetting it and have designed Wayland to replace it.

Wayland is a rewrite of X from the ground up, and is much more secure. It keeps each program in its own bubble, so if a rogue app tries to gain control of programs outside its bubble, it can’t. However, such a large change requires other programs to buy in, creating s vicious cycle where developers don’t want to switch to Wayland until it’s mature, and Wayland is unable to mature without developers buying in. That’s why this “new” protocol has been in progress for the past 16 years, and yet linux users still disagree on whether it is mature enough for wide adoption.

GNOME desktop environment has been at the forefront of Wayland adoption, and has announced plans to stop using X in a future release. Ubuntu, which uses GNOME by default, has announced they are dropping X so they can see how it works in their short-term release before pushing it to their 2026 long-term release. Essentially, they are doing it when the timing works best for them rather than wait until GNOME forces them to drop it.