There’s a very nice (albeit somewhat outdated) talk here.
In a nutshell, both X11 and Wayland are protocols that define how software should communicate to (hopefully) display stuff on your screen.
Protocols as in there’s a bunch of documentation somewhere that says which function a program must call to create a window, without specifying how either program or function should be implemented.
This is great because it allows for independently written software to be magically compatible.
X11 is the older protocol, and was working fine good enough for many years, but has issues handling a bunch of modern in-deman technologies - issues which can’t be fixed without changing the protocol in a way that would make it incompatible with existing software (which is the entire point).
Plus its most used implementation - Xorg, consists of a huge and complex codebase that fewer and fewer people are willing to deal with.
Wayland is the newer protocol, that mostly does the exact same thing, but better, in a way that allows for newer tech, and completely breaks compatibility in order to do so.
The trouble with the whole situation was that in order to replace X with Wayland basically the entire Linux graphics stack had to be rewritten - and it was, with raging debates and flame wars and Nvidia being lame.
They also wrote a compatibility layer called Xwayland that lets you keep using older X-only apps which somehow manages to outperform Xorg.
Now we’re at the point where major distributions are not only switching to Wayland by default, but also dropping support for Xorg completely, and announcing that they’ll no longer maintain it, which is why posts about it keep popping up.
I don’t see a real „versus“ here. Wayland will definitely become the standard display server for Linux distributions. This is not sysV init vs systemd or something else. As pointed out by lots of ppl here X11 is old and insecure because it is from another time and does not fit into modern systems and requirements, thus it is way easier to start new and fresh instead of working around for any feature needed and maintain such a old code base. The only downside for me personally is that Wayland does not support always on top windows automatically. So either right click the window or use plugins for videos from Firefox for example. AFAIK this is also for security reasons. I run Wayland on my main machine for years now, no problems at all. If I got the choice I would always go for Wayland. Even Cinnamon has experimental Wayland support now and hopefully will make the switch soon.
unless you are a developer, there’s not a whole lot to worry about – you’ll switch from one to the other when your distro switches and, chances are, you’ll never notice
the drama comes from the fact that the Linux community loves choices (and arguing over those choices) and, as @skullgiverpoints out, most of the choices have fallen by the wayside over the years
X is old and very hard to maintain. A lot of rules about how displays work have changed drastically since X became a thing. X went along with most of those changes, which meant the introduction of more and more hacks to keep it running.
Over time X became worse and worse to work on and people realized that it’s easier to write something new from scratch instead of trying to fix the decade-old technical debt in X.
That new thing was Wayland and over time most if not all people that where interested in working on desktop compositing pivoted away from X.
Wayland (as it is always the case with new software of that size) didn’t hit the ground running. It had various issues at the beginning and also follows a different desig philosophy than X.
Despite a lot of issues being fixed some people are still very vocal about not wanting to use wayland for one reason or another. While some of those reasons are valid, most come from ignorance or laziness to adapt.
Add comment