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ELI5 the whole Wayland vs X11 going on.
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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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X (not formerly twitter) is decades old and is built around deprecated ways of doing things as well as a lot of legacy functions.
Wayland is a relatively new project with the aim of replacing X as a more "modern" display server.
Wayland had some stability issues, but they've since improved.
I'm sure Wayland is good and all, but I can't be arsed replacing X yet. I don't really have any skin in the game, I just don't replace functioning components just because they're old (FYI, bash turns 35 this year). While X does what I need it to do, I'll keep using it. I'll probably move over when my distro does.
I'll leave the technical explanation to someone else.
That's right. To add a few things: X11 isn't bad. It's just a big and complex piece of software that has grown for multiple decades. And nobody wants to do big changes or add new things anymore.
Wayland is the modern and "fresh" new approach. I've had some issues with my NVidia graphics card. But that wasn't Waylands fault, but the NVidia drivers. I have a laptop with just Intel graphics and both X11 and Wayland run excellently on that machine.
With Linux we often get many choices, and have several alternatives available to do the same / a similar job. That is a bit complicated for someone new. But we should embrace it, be glad that we can pick whatever suits our individual needs. Wayland still has some issues on a few specific setups, but eventually it will replace X11 as the default.
I remember messing around with font servers 25 years ago in XFree86. Are font servers still a thing with X11?
The X font server has been deprecated like 10 years ago. I doubt you'll find it as an option in a modern distribution. Nowadays fonts are rendered by the client (application) with something like the Cairo library (if I'm not mistaken).
Yeah. Wayland works great on my laptop. I can’t even log in on my desktop because it’s Nvidia. As a light Linux user the difference doesn’t really mean much to me aside from the fact it doesn’t work on my desktop.
nvidia drivers aren't THAT bad imho. I just had to experiment with different driver and kernel versions to get my 4060 running properly on my primary PC.