X Window System Basics (2014)

> I am amazed that people try to force limited and unfinished Wayland

Can we just not do this useless flamewar under every similar topic’s thread? Especially that no, noone wants to force Wayland, they want something that is under active maintenance, which X11 is not anymore, since every maintainer of it left/migrated to Wayland.

> Not to mention that A LOT of stuff is X11 only and not ported (and never will be) to Wayland.

Hmm, only if the goddamn maintainers of X11 who came up with Wayland thought of that. They could have named it something like W11.. no, XWayland!

The issues with xorg that i’m aware of are that it’s awful to maintain and that it has security issues like everything being able to access your clipboard.

And xwayland exists so porting isn’t much of an issue.

But yeah, despite all that i’m on x11 still as well. I need to use proprietary nvidia drivers and I don’t want to run full gnome or whatever to make that run smoothly. I’ll probably be dead before dwm stops working on an updated system.

Wayland is a complicated and sore topic for a lot of people, but I think I've gained some perspective over time.

From a historical perspective, the "why Wayland?" question is incredibly obvious IMO. The old Linux graphics stack consisted of the dumb Linux framebuffer and fbcon, and the separate Xorg stack with all its DDX/UMS drivers that required root-level permissions, and only provided a graphics API for ... Xorg. Your options were either Xorg, or the framebuffer, which IIRC didn't always support all of the available display modes.

Wayland was part of a wider push to rewrite the Linux graphics stack, with the new stack of KMS/DRM/DRI3/Mesa being a huge improvement over the 2000s Linux GUI stack. This came at the cost of old UMS and DRI drivers, making e.g. PowerPC Mac GPUs largely useless now (very unstable and incapable of suspend-to-RAM), while unifying mode-setting between the kernel and userland (no more praying the video card doesn't crash when ctrl-alt-f2'ing), also allowing for an arbitrary number of shared video buffers to be created (including by non GLX video applications) which makes compositors work in a not-hacked-together sense, but also allows for e.g. hardware video decoders to work in a not-hacky way.

Coupled with the addition of evdev to replace the Xorg DDX stuff like all the custom peripheral drivers, and you finally had a kernel-level API for accessing your video and input hardware. These were all prerequisites for the idea of "Wayland", decoupling the video and input layers from the display server and creating a low level API for window server things, so that you can have both small window servers (e.g. wlroots-based compositors) as well as "thick" environments (Mutter/KWin-based desktops).

Part of what makes this confusing is a lot of these benefits trickled down to Xorg itself. Nowadays evdev (and libinput) have replaced the old DDXs on Xorg, and I think most distros have switched to using xf86-video-modesetting, which could be thought of as "Wayland-style rendering on Xorg", in the sense it uses pure DRM and Mesa to render instead of GPU-specific DDX drivers.

So Xorg has gotten a lot of the benefits of Wayland's development "for free" anyway. This is intentional, as you mention, a lot of things will never be ported to Wayland. Wayland is not a replacement for X11, but an API for implementing the display server at a lower level than X11 allowed, while allowing us to implement full X11 compatibility "for free", by embedding Xorg in the form of Xwayland.

I think this makes a ton of sense for the majority of desktop-environment level compositors like Mutter (GNOME) and KWin (Plasma), which were already massive and implemented so much of their own functionality outside of Xorg, that it made sense to just let them do their own compositing. Same with GTK and Qt, which were already doing "their own rendering" outside of X.

Didn't mean for this to become an apologetic rant for Wayland, but as a "wayland skeptic" myself I feel like most anti-wayland arguments miss the forest for the trees (screen sharing not working). As an olive branch, though, I'll also add I don't think the wayland version of the big compositors like Mutter or KWin actually do much for end users, and it's pretty shameful how they've been launched with so many bugs, with no compelling user story beyond "better scaling" and "flicker".

I have T14 (AMD version) with Arch on it. I use Wayland because it's the only way to get HiDPI and fractional scaling to work well.

Pretty much the only problem I have with it, is lack of good screen-recording software. OBS is a bit of an overkill for short screen-casts.

In the examples of screen sharing and recording, they work on Wayland but the application needs to be aware and request permission. Zoom and Chrome both support this, AFAIK.

> I am amazed that people try to force limited and unfinished Wayland instead of X11.

The xorg people phylosophy seems to be: if it works, fix it. Since xorg forked XFree86 the quality has gone down.

Rust has a very real purpose. Make certain common classes of bug stop.

I don't see any real alternatives to it that go as far as Rust does for safety.

I'm not a Wayland fan due to the lack of keylogging (Needed for global shortcuts and easily writing daemons that use keyboard input) and screenshotting as standard features, but it's not like it's being forced on people, the community as a whole is demanding stronger and stronger security guarantees, "All your stuff has access to all your other stuff" doesn't seem to be good enough for many people.

Can you please knock off the conspiracy theories and baseless personal attacks? Why are you doing this? You don't have to bring yourself down to that level.

Well, the web can shift rendering between server and client side depending on the developers’ needs, but graphics is done mostly on the client side with their hardware. And while things tend to cycle between “centralized” then “edge computing” and back, graphics does make more sense to stuck to the client device, especially with ever bigger screen resolutions/color spaces/refresh rates paired with low-latency requirements.

I had a Tektronix dumb X terminal die with literal black smoke pouring out the back of it at work circa 1992. It turned out great cause I got a Sun as a replacement.

I don't think that is the case. Pretty much all distros have an X server available. A few distros install some desktop environment out of the box and some of those use a desktop environment that uses a Wayland compositor instead of an X server using the kernel graphics APIs, but even in those environments there is an X server (XWayland) right above the compositor (technically you can have a Wayland setup without XWayland but that'd just make the desktop less useful so i don't think there is any distro doing that by default - though even if there is, i don't think it'd be majority).

But TBH i think most distros either use X server based environments or do not provide a default OOTB environment at all.

Wayland seems more in line with Python3 than IPv6. With Valve now helping with the development and nearly all other issues addressed... seems it will be the default on all major distros within the next few years.

IPv6 maybe, but Wayland's protocol choices were IMHO caused by that part of the UI stack getting nigh zero resources. So every iteration from XFree86 ended up deprecating and removing features, and Wayland turns not having features into a 'feature'; Actual standards move into Desktop environments where (some) investment was happening. The standard following economics, as it were.