[Mouseover text] Thomas Jefferson thought that every law and every constitution should be torn down and rewritten from scratch every nineteen years–which means X is overdue.
As somebody that first configured X back in 1991, I agree with this message.
To be fair though, with KMS, libdrm, and libinput, setting up X is 1000 times easier than it used to be. I suspect most users never even need to open Xorg.conf or even know it exists.
Ironically, all these technologies are also used by Wayland. A lot of what Wayland does not do, Xorg basically does not do either.
X is old and works for the most part but fixing stuff or adding features is hard.
Wayland is new and is supposed to be a successor to X, do what it couldn’t do and don’t repeat the mistakes from it. It should be a drop-in replacement like pipewire but isn’t. Features take long time to develop as devs are engrossed thinking of the best solution to make it happen. A lot of proposed solutions are dismissed as well.
I think the drama around Wayland can be explained by the sentence “it should be a drop-in replacement like pipewire but isn’t”.
Without taking a side on that issue, I will point out that this was not a goal for the Wayland designers ( in their own words - I do not have time to go find a quote but have read this sentiment many times ). Wayland detractors agree with your sentence and, given that expectation, are legitimately upset and even confused that Wayland continues to gain mind and market share against X11.
If you feel that Wayland needs to be a drop-in replacement for X11, it is not ready and may never be. By that metric, some people see Wayland as a failed technology and perceive Wayland users as shills and zealots.
If you are interested in a display server that addresses some of the core design problems in X11 and do not mind moving to something new, Wayland is starting to look ready for prime-time.
If you are non-technical and / or unopinionated the debate is probably irrelevant. Wayland will most likely become the default on whatever Linux distribution you use sometime in 2024 or 2025. You will be a Wayland user. Maybe you already are.
If you are willing to step outside the mainstream, using X11 without Wayland is going to be possible for at least another decade. That said, I am saying “outside the mainstream” because not only will popular Linux distributions and desktop environments start to become Wayland only but the innovation is all going to move to Wayland. There will be many Wayland-only compositors, apps, and features. 5 years from now, not using Wayland is going to really limit the desktop experience. I expect some toolkits ( GTK, Qt, and maybe even WINE ) to drop X11 support at some point ( maybe not soon but sooner than 10 years maybe ). 5 - 10 years may seem like a long time but it will likely come faster than X11 stalwarts expect.
I would say that is a false dichotomy. Almost everyone agrees that X11 isn’t the future but the support for Wayland and the specific ways it does things, is not nearly as universal as that. It is just that the problem is huge and has already taken 15 years or so and so it looks like if we want some alternative to X11 that will be done any time soon Wayland is unfortunately the only game in town, no matter how flawed it is.
I’m not a Wayland fan by any stretch, but I’ve come to the same confusion you did. And so has almost everyone else. Which is the real point of my comment I guess.
I think the main problem is that Wayland is not a drop in replacement.
Every software needs to support Wayland, new environment flags need to be created, flags must be used with electron apps…
Nvidia support has been spotty and some functionality has not yet been implemented. I use a custom .xcompose file, which doesn’t work on electron apps. Let me know if there’s a better way to mimic window’s dead keys.
Overall, it’s hard for an end user to change from a solution that is working perfectly to a solution that requires a ton of work and doesn’t yet have the same functionality.
Everyone can understand that Wayland is the future but depending on your needs and hardware the current experience can be great or terrible.
Sure but as someone starting with a new system Wayland just works. Example multitouch works right away on Wayland and if I remember correctly needs configuration on x11.
I had to set a ton more. Without the ozone flags my electron apps flicker and have this sync problem that appears to eat letters while I type them. Different electron apps use different configuration files, it’s a mess.
I wouldn’t consider my setup to be complex enough for the amount of trouble I had to make the system work under Wayland.
I’m using an Nvidia GPU, I’m sure things would be more streamlined if I had something else.
A switch from X11 to Wayland is not just a minor change to your workflow though unless you used all defaults before.
It requires you to replace your window manager, all the little tools related to things like clipboard, automation, screen locking,…
And you would have to do pretty much all of that up front to be able to use Wayland long enough to know if it even works on a permanent basis for you. That is a lot of work to put into a project that has a sketchy history of people claiming for nearly a decade now that it works just fine for everything while clearly not working fine for all use cases.
The point wasn’t so much that there are no replacements, more that every script and every shortcut and everything else using them will have to be changed to work with the Wayland alternative.
Back in the day X was a great protocol that reflected the needs of the time.
Applications asked it to draw some lines and text.
It sent input events to applications.
People also wanted to customize how their windows were laid out more flexibly. So the window manager appeared. This would move all of your windows around for you and provide some global shortcuts for things.
Then graphics got more complicated. All of a sudden the simple drawing primitives of X weren’t sufficient. Other than lines, text and rectangles applications wanted gradients, rounded corners and to display rich graphics. So now instead of using all of these fancy drawing APIs they were just uploading big bitmaps to the X server. At this point 1/3 of what the X server was previously doing became obsolete.
Next people wanted fancy effects and transparency (like drop shadows). So window managers started compositing the display. This is great but now they need more control than just moving windows around on the display in case they are warped, rendered somewhere slightly differently or on a different workspace. So now all input events go first from X to the window manager, then back to X, then to the application. Also output needs to be processed by the window manager, so it is sent from the client to X, then to the window manager, then the composited output is sent to X. So another 1/3 of what X was doing became obsolete.
So now what is the X server doing:
Outputting the composited image to the display.
Receiving input from input devices.
Shuffling messages and graphics between the window manager and applications.
It turns out that 1 and 2 have got vastly simpler over the years, and can now basically be solved by a few libraries. 3 is just overhead (especially if you are trying to use X over a network because input and output need to make multiple round-trips each).
So 1 and 2 turned into libraries and 3 was just removed. Basically this made the X server disappear. Now the window manager just directly read input and displayed output usually using some common libraries.
Now removing the X server is a breaking change, so it was a great time to rethink a lot of decisions. Some of the highlights are:
Accessing other applications information (output and input capture) requires explicit permission. This is a key piece to sandboxing applications.
Organize the system around frames to avoid tearing except for when desired (X doesn’t really have the concept of a frame).
Remove lots of basically unused APIs like fonts, drawing and many others.
So the future is great. Simpler, faster, more secure and more extensible. However getting there takes time.
This was also slowed down by some people trying to resist some features that X had (such as applications being able to position themselves). And with a few examples like that it can be impossible to make a nice port of an application to Wayland. However over time these features are being added and these days most applications have good Wayland support.
I’ve recently switched to Nobara, and has been unsure whether to go with Wayland or X11. Mostly because I’ve read that Wayland has issues on NVIDIA GPUs and will perform slower, so I went with X11 (On KDE). Is that still the case nowadays, or can I just use Wayland?
Afaik the Nvidia issues are pretty much resolved now, though it may depend on exactly which GPU you use.
It’s definitely worth using Wayland if it’s not having issues, and switching back is absurdly easy, so I’d recommend using Wayland and going back to X if you’re encountering issues.
Tldr: it’ll probably be fine, give it a go and see
Applications needs some coordination between each other in order to act like you would expect - things like one window at a time having focus and thus getting all keyboard and mouse inputs. As well as things like positioning on the screen and which screen to render to, the clipboard, and various others things.
X is a server and set of protocols that applications can implement to allow all this behaviour. X11 is the 11th version of the server and protocols. But X was also first created in 1984, and X11 since around 1987. Small changes have been made to X11 over the years but the last was in 2012.
Which makes it a very old protocol - and one which is showing its age. Advances in hardware since then and the way we use devices have left a lot to be desired in the protocol and while it has adapted a bit to keep up with modern tech it has not done so in the best of ways. I also believe its codebase is quite complex and hard to work with so changes are hard to do.
Thus is has quite a lot of limitations that modern systems are rubbing up against - for instance it does not really support multi cursors or input that is not a mouse and keyboard. So things like touch screens or pen/tablets tend to emulate a mouse and thus affect the only pointer X has. It is also not great at touchpads and things like touch pad gestures - while they do work, they are often clunky or not as flexible as some applications need.
It is also very insecure and has no real security measures in place - any GUI application has far more access to the system and input then it really requires. For instance; any application can screen grab the screen at any point in time - not something you really want when you have a banking web page open.
Wayland is basically a new set of protocols that takes more modern hardware and security practices in mind. It does the same fundamental job as X11, but without the same limitations X11 has and to fix a lot of the security issues with X.
One big difference with X though is that Wayland is just a protocol, and not a protocol and server like X. Instead it shifts the responsibilities of the X server into the window manager/compositor (which used to manage window placement and window borders as well as global effects such as any animations or transparency). It also has better controls over things like screen grabs so not every application can just grab a screen shot at once or register global shortcut keys or various things like that. Which for a while was a problem as screen sharing applications or even screenshot tools did not work - but over time these limitations have been added back in more secure ways than how X11 did them.
Additionally any application using a GUI toolkit (like kde, qt or gtk etc) only needs to to update to a version that has native Wayland support. Which means most applications already support it. At least if they don’t use any X11 APIs directly (which is not that common).
Dude come on. Make an effort. If you really haven’t a clue then start by reading the KDE developer’s blog “Pointiest Stick” and github user Probonopd and his article + links gist.github.com/…/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f227…
Not only is @jacksilver right, but additionally, this article is extremely biased in favor of Xorg and is much more of a (completely unfair and one-sided) take-down of Wayland oriented at technical folks and not at all an explainer for laypeople
Not OP, but the point of asking for an ELI5 is that sometimes you don’t even know where to start. For example I clicked the link you provided and only have more questions as I don’t really know what people mean by display servers, etc.
Sure I could look everything up and try to understand, but the hope is someone in the community might provide a better or faster summary than what can currently be found online.
Something similar has been asked loads and loads of times. It’s not needed to investigate, just searching for previous discussions is enough. It sometimes surprises me that people don’t read one of the many times the same was asked before. That said, despite the same questions coming up many times there’s often multiple people who will gladly explain things. So I agree that it doesn’t make sense to complain about it. I’m a bit surprised that nothing would come up though. It really gets asked regularly.
I get your point. I don’t know about OP, but I hadn’t seen a similar thread, but I usually browse all so easily miss posts for specific communities.
Also, I’ve found search on Lemmy hit or miss. The federation aspect of everything makes search sometimes difficult or confusing. For example, what community would most likely have already provided an ELI5 post and how would it have been phrased?
I feel like you guys aren’t really “explaining like I’m 5”. Let me show you: Sometimes, when a mommyboard and a daddy graphics card fall in love, the daddy graphics card puts his connector pins inside the mommyboard’s expansion slot. Then when they both get turned on, millions of tiny electrons surge out of his connector pins and into her expansion slot, where they travel up through mommyboard’s data bus, and into one of her memory cards. Meanwhile, there are thousands of image files inside mommy’s storage drives waiting to come to life, and every once in a while one of them ventures out of the storage drive and into her memory card. And if the electrons and the image file happen to meet at the same time, then 9 milliseconds later, a picture of a baby appears on the monitor!
And wayland represents the overly friendly postman that left the house with a satisfied smirk just as the daddy board came home from his hard workday as an xorg liason.
Basically a long time ago Linux/Unix was run on big machines in a separate room with all the fancy graphics hardware, and you’d have a dumb little machine at your desk that could barely draw pixels on a screen. So X11 was designed with all these fantastic neat server-client mechanisms that made it great for running on a mainframe.
Fast forward 30 years and all that stuff is useless now that everyone has built in graphics (as well as several other issues with X11’s archaic design). So some smart people who didn’t know any better made a new thing that everything has to be rewritten for (because they were smart, but didn’t know any better). Then someone who did know a little better was like, what if we take the old bloated one and rewrite it for the new lean one. So now everything runs in an X11 session inside a Wayland server, which has to be rewritten for everything because Wayland is a protocol, not a server.
But one of the really nice things about it is that everything has to be rewritten, so we can make newer, fancier bugs.
Edit: I don’t want you to take the impression that I think Wayland is bad. Wayland is way better than X, it just sucks that we have to rewrite a bunch of stuff for it and figure out new ways of doing things that were dead simple in X, but very insecure.
Also window managers started compositing which moved 1/3 of what X was doing to the window manager. Then applications started doing their own rendering which moved another 1/3 of what X was doing to the applications. All that is left over is basically the low-level IO which had gotten greatly simpler over the years and could basically be packaged into a few libraries (mesa and libinput primarily) and some complex mutli-hop IPC which was completely unnecessary.
X11 is like a big dilapidated house. It doesn’t work very well anymore and is difficult to maintain.
Wayland is new modern house. Smaller and more efficient, but missing some amenities that the old house had that some people still want, like a wood burning stove.
Most features missing right now (not all) are against the Wayland philosophy, this doesn’t mean that you won’t get anything but that it needs a “modern era replacement”. Though applications will need to support the replacement. This is usually for good reasons.
The prime example is screen recording. Allowing any program to read and write the entire screen is objectively wrong, no matter what the big time X11 fans say. But there is a replacement: pipewire. Pipewire is extremely advanced and featureful, and it’s more secure because it allows the system and the user to audit who is reading the screen and what part. The problem is that programs need to support pipewire for screen recording, but the main culprits are niche screen recorders (OBS is the best anyway, and it supports it) and proprietary video call software like discord (zoom supports it), which is silly because for electron apps it’s literally a matter of using a version less than 3 years old an adding a flag.
X/X11 is a client-server protocol from the age of 10Mbps networks, intended for a bunch of “dumb terminals” connected to a mainframe that runs the apps, with several “optimizations” that over time have become useless cruft.
Wayland is a local machine display system, intended for computers capable of running apps on the same machine as the display (aka: about everything for the past 30 years).
Nowadays, it makes more sense to have a Wayland system (with some RDP app if needed), than an X11 system with a bunch of hacks and cruft that only makes everything slower and harder to maintain. An X11 server app acting as a “dumb terminal”, can still be run on a Wayland system to display X11 client apps if needed.
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.
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.
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.
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).
There is t really a whole thing. Wayland is where Linux is going as the people who developed X11 say it is insecure and it’s to hard to fix the issues so they went and started Wayland. They should have called it X12 or something then there would probably be less complaining.
Haha that’s my thoughts exactly. Anyone that complains should go try to maintain x11 so they can understand way development is moving to Wayland. I’m not a dev at all and I don’t understand but I love reading the blog post from devs
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