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ELI5 the whole Wayland vs X11 going on.
(programming.dev)
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Most applications get their Wayland support from the toolkit they are written in. Qt ( KDE ) and GTK ( GNOME ) apps are going to work in any Wayland compositor.
Some applications do “desktop” related things like try to take screenshots to set global hot keys. Wayland, strictly speaking, does not allow this. This becomes the job of the “compositor” ( Window Manager ) and so, if an application wants to do those things, it has to know how to talk to the compositor.
Increasingly, the desktop environments and compositors are aligning on how to surface some of these capabilities to applications in a common way.