473

If anyone wants to give an ELI5 or a link to a video that ELI5 I'd be incredibly thankful

I swear that all the stuff I find is like super in depth technical stuff that just loses me in no time flat

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] shrugs@lemmy.world 81 points 6 months ago

I'll try to explain:

In the past we only had text terminals without a graphical interface ~1990 (sh / bash / tty). so the display server (Xorg / formaly known as X11) was born. it's a piece of software that allows programs to not only print text to screen but to draw complex geometrical shapes. This allowed for gui programs that use frameworks like qt or gtk or motif... to draw buttons and shit using Xorg.

For having mutliple "windows" / "programs" running they invented a window manager, that drew a border around the windows with some min / max /close buttons and the modern gui was good to go. btw. the next step are desktop environments like kde or gnome but that would be too much for this post.

Back to display server (Xorg) and window manager (kwin, mutter, metacity, dwm, awesome, i3...): the design of xorg is super old and has many shortcomings like hdr, variable refreshrate or security: every window can read the contents of or produce input for other windows which is a nightmare for todays security standards.

So wayland was invented to use state of the art concepts and design. Here comes the big problem: State of the art concepts required wayland to not be a display manager like Xorg. wayland is more like a protocol that defines how to draw windows, resize and close them or how they are allowed to talk to each other. Since wayland is only a protocol+ the window manager now needs to do the heavy lifting of coordinating this protocol, drawing and stuff like that, which in turn results in way less window managers that support wayland because they are complex as hell.

Since modern software needs to support a heck of a lot of different ways for applications to interact with each other rewriting these functionality for wayland needs time. thats the reason desktop sharing/recording or muting your mic with a keyboard shortcut when the webex window was not in focus wasn't possible at first. new solutiones needed to be developed for that (pipewire for example). Many programs would run in an xorg window that was implemented as a wayland window (xwayland) which made transitioning to wayland much easier but introduced new problems.

At the moment we are in a transitional phase. many programs already work without problems, but many software still require features wayland doesn't have and might never implement. Everyone needing that software is hating on wayland. everyone needing variable refreshrate, fractional scaling or security prefers to use wayland. And the fighting begins.

Disclaimer: There might be errors, simplifications or misunderstandings on my side but thats the way i understood if. Feel free to correct any mistakes on my part.

[-] danekrae@lemmy.world 9 points 6 months ago

I read this with the voice of the narrator in the Animatrix movie.

For having mutliple “windows” / “programs” running they invented a window manager (and for a time, it was good)

[-] shrugs@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago

I hope this made it more enjoyable to read. English is not my first language

[-] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 8 points 6 months ago

I wouldn't have guessed that!

this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
473 points (96.1% liked)

linuxmemes

21281 readers
217 users here now

Hint: :q!


Sister communities:


Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
  • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
  • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
  •  

    Please report posts and comments that break these rules!


    Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.

    founded 1 year ago
    MODERATORS