undefined | Better HN

0 pointsDCKing5y ago0 comments

Wayland is a display protocol.

X.org is a display protocol, its own server implementation of that protocol, and many utilities to interface with that server. And even more stuff.

To illustrate this: if you run Gnome on X.org, you will see you have an 'xorg' binary running in addition to all the Gnome stuff. That's the X11 server from X.org. If you run Gnome on Wayland, there's no 'wayland' stuff running. There's just Gnome implementing the Wayland display protocol.

That's why this "switching to Wayland" talk is just missing the point. You're not really switching to Wayland, you're just switching to a "pure Gnome" stack, or a "pure KDE" stack, or a "pure Sway" stack. These stacks all just happen to implement the Wayland protocol in their own compositors (i.e. Mutter, KWin, Sway) because they're committed to standardization and all want to run GTK3+Qt5+Ozone+XWayland+etc apps built for Wayland.

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

wnoise5y ago· 2 in thread

Yes, and I don't want to switch to a pure stack from _any_ desktop environment. I want all these things to easily mix and match. And for all these things outside the pure wayland protocol (and some supposedly inside it), they don't.

DCKingOP5y ago

I'm not sure why that's your takeaway here. Wayland exists precisely because things should easily mix and match - it should be easy to get your apps displaying/moving on any standard compositor. The same would go for other Freedesktop standards to do things like input, clipboard interaction, and screen recording.

The only difference is that all these things currently used to exist within the X.org project, and now they're in various other places (some parts in fact don't exist at all...). There's nothing stopping people from abstracting a lot of this functionality out in a library for others to more easily build their own stuff with it [1]!

If anything the efforts replacing X11 will make it easier to mix and match components, because it gets rid of the focus on the singular X.org implementation. Not saying multiple implementations of the same thing is necessarily a good thing mind you, but you can't accuse these efforts of making it more difficult to mix and match.

[1]: e.g. https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots does some of this to make it more easy to build a window manager that supports Wayland

yyyk5y ago

Except wlroots cannot be the standard library due to the NVidia problem. Even after that is fixed, the different implementations are far enough along they will never be merged. We will have at least four duplicate not entire compatible implementations for the near future.

I'm sure dealing with different extensions and subtle bugs makes everyone who needs to deal with it very happy, and will help Linux desktop adoption (not). Perhaps eventually the cost of keeping up will reduce desktop fragmentation and everyone will be stuck with only a single option for an OSS desktop environment.

Wayland replaced a bad technical situation with X11 with a bad social situation with Wayland. Technical problems can be solved with enough work (e.g. Wayland itself to replace X), social problems however can persist for a long time and aren't so easy to fix. It didn't have to be that way. Perhaps it still doesn't if the community could actually standardize while prioritizing the main use cases.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse