It doesn’t help that they keep deprecating and changing standard stuff every other version. It’s like they can’t make up their mind and everything may be subject to change. Updating to the most recent release can suddenly cause 10s or 100s of compiler warnings/errors and things may no longer behave the same. Then you look up the new documentation and realize that you have to refactor a large part of the codebase because the “new way” is for whatever reason vastly different.

On distros w/o systemd there is always syslog-ng. s6 also has its own log system.

It’s not necessary, but a good thing to have if something goes wrong and you want to debug/monitor something. It’s really up to you and your needs.

https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker

Gallium-Nine also tends to be buggy if used with 32-bit software in particular. All the 32-bit games I’ve tried have problems with it. They usually work fine for the first 30-60 minutes and after that the framerate becomes unstable to the point where the game becomes unplayable. It happens consistently with Gallium-nine but not at all with DXVK.

US Imperials about to seethe

I have the same experience. I wrote a simple program with SDL2 to test a software renderer. All it does is create a window then go into an event loop and after each iteration it streams a framebuffer to a texture that gets displayed in the window. In the default mode (X11) my frame timings fluctuate a lot and for a while I tried to massage the code to get it stable because I was convinced that it was just my draw code. Then I eventually forced SDL2 to use Wayland and not only did the draw time per frame go down by 2ms but the fluctuations went away completely.

Kepler cards work “OK” with nouveau. What sucks is that reclocking has to be done manually, video decoding/encoding requires firmware blobs and OpenGL support tends to be meh. Overall it’s an unstable experience. I have a stack of Kepler based cards that would still be usable if Linux/mesa had a decent driver.