What should stable NixOS prioritize?

You release managers convinced me! Until the upstream projects test more comprehensively, we’re best off aligning ourselves to their ways. There’s ways to use any freed-up contributor time than fighting to make an odd combination of these components work.

Perhaps there will be a time “post wayland” when things settle down, but I get the sense right now the guts of mainstream Desktop Linux are rather unstable (in the original sense of “shifting around”, not necessary “broken” :)). This state of affairs increases the costs of non-alignment.

I absolutely agree with what @Mathnerd314 is saying about us needing to improve CI and what-not so we aren’t constantly shooting ourselves in the foot, but I think this is a little different, because I doubt it will be possible to incrementally update these desktop components while not breaking things — there is no magic “grey code” upgrade path.

  • First of all, even the most ambitious testing plans don’t call for the necessary suite of consumer hardware and CIing physical interactions (does hibernate work? Is there tearing? etc.)

  • Even if we did all that, we might be stuck contributing to the underlying packages much more than we can afford to actually fix discovered issues.

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