This lengthy livestream serves as a "State of the Union" for T2 Linux, confirming its questionable strategic shift toward becoming a "AAA" polished desktop OS. The creator details spending over 1,000 hours in inefficient labor merely to integrate mandatory but "broken" components (SystemD, Wayland, modern KDE), despite a profound personal distaste for SystemD's complexity. The video functions largely as a critique of the Linux desktop ecosystem, which is described as bloated, fragile, and plagued by new feature regressions. T2 plans an immutable, binary-updated architecture (like SteamOS) for a release by FOSDEM 2024, aiming to deliver stability superior to modern macOS.
State of T2 Linux: A Critical Look at the "Modern" Desktop Stack
0:00 Shift to Desktop: T2 Linux is moving away from its embedded focus to target the desktop, aiming for a "AAA" experience superior to current Windows and macOS, which the creator finds too broken.
0:53 SystemD Integration (Necessary Evil): SystemD is now included by default, required for modern desktop components (Logind, PolicyKit, PipeWire). The creator integrated it but states, "I hate systemd now that I made systemd work. I hate it even more" (11:31).
1:33 The 1,000-Hour Grind: The maintainer claims to have spent over 1,000 hours this year debugging and fixing upstream brokenness just to achieve a functional desktop environment. This is clearly an indictment of the quality of modern Linux desktop components.
4:51 Quality Target: The goal is not to copy other Linux solutions or Windows, but to achieve the polish and reliability of macOS from 10 years ago.
6:21 Release Timeline: A public, user-ready download is optimistically targeted for Christmas but may slip until FOSDEM next year.
7:49 Live Demos and Crashes: The live demo showcases persistent issues like strange SystemD timeouts (7:18), PolicyKit delays (21:35), and session crashes (11:42).
15:55 Bizarre Bugs: A critical example of upstream failure is the terminal running console commands twice (15:55, 26:15), a bug the creator finds baffling and indicative of poor programming quality.
14:40 Complexity Crisis: The modern desktop stack (DBus, PolicyKit, SystemD, PipeWire, WirePlumber) is criticized for being overwhelmingly complex, fragile, and requiring excessive effort for basic integration.
20:04 Mesa/GPU Frustration: The creator rants about Mesa's move of legacy drivers to the "Ember" branch, which causes integration headaches and required hours of debugging just to find the necessary environment variable exports to run correctly (21:01).
24:04 Upstream Contributions: T2 developers have sent over 30 patches to the Linux kernel recently, including fixes for Nouveau drivers and adding temperature sensor support for the Steam Deck CPU, filling gaps left by larger distributions.
34:38 Bloat is Real: Both KDE and GNOME are heavily criticized for excessive bloat (around 200 packages for a base KDE session) while looking minimally different than they did 20 years ago. The componentization is absurd (e.g., needing K nighttime or K unit conversion modules).
46:45 Immutable Architecture: T2 plans to abandon traditional package management for its core system. It will ship as a compressed, immutable root system, providing binary differential updates weekly (similar to SteamOS/macOS) for quick, reliable security updates.
52:37 Web Engine Stance: T2 will ship Firefox by default, favoring its known reliability. The creator is hesitant to ship Chromium by default due to its extreme build time (1 hour 20 minutes on a Ryzen 1750X) compared to Firefox (10 minutes).
1:20:05 SystemD Regressions: The video concludes with the discovery of a new regression in the latest SystemD user session class handling, reinforcing the creator's view that the "modern, just working stuff" is constantly introducing new breakage. As far as I can tell, this is just the expected reality of adopting fast-moving, high-complexity components.