Very true about the Wayland vs X11 knowledge. I didn’t learn about that until quite a while after startint to use Mint. Even know I don’t really umderstand what it does (something rendering and windows?), it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in day to day use anyways.
You do not need to understand anything about X11 vs Wayland. Use whatever your distro of choice defaults to.
Wayland is the future. Every Linux desktop user not fighting hard to avoid it will be using Wayland in 2 years. The majority are already.
Wayland and X11 are both protocols. They are a way for graphical applications to talk to a “display server” (your graphical desktop).
X11 was invented in the 80’s. Until recently, there was essentially only one surviving implementation on Linux—something called Xorg. While Xorg was the display server, you had to add something called a “window manager” to control what your desktop would look like and how windows would behave.
While Wayland essentially does the same thing as X11, it was built to quite a different set of design criteria. If you have not been part of the history, it is not worth knowing about. Security is one of the big improvements.
Perhaps the only detail worth mentioning is that the display server and window manager functions have been combined in Wayland into something called a “compositor”. So while everybody was using Xorg back in the X11 days, there are many competing compositor implementations in Wayland. They differ not just in how they manage windows but also in how them implement many other details like how to take screenshots, manage multiple monitors, or handle scaling. There are a set of standards that define this behaviour. It is a bit like the web where you have different web browsers and web servers but the same web applications work on all of turn (which perhaps some small differences).
The two systems both “do the same thing” and are quite different at the same time. If you use one, switching to the other may seem painful as things that worked may not anymore and even things that still work may be done differently or require quite different knowledge. Not many people switch from Wayland to X11 but anybody that used Linux 5 years ago has had to switch from X11 to Wayland (or feel pressured to). Not all of them are happy about it. Some of them rely on workflows that Wayland does not yet or many never support. These people consider the switch to Wayland a really big deal which is why you hear about it so much.
But, if you already use Wayland, ignore it. Everybody will stop talking about it soon as almost everybody has switched. The majority that have not switched are using popular desktops like Cinnamon or XFCE that have also not switched. They have not switched as they want to make the transition very seem-less for their users. Which also means you do not have to think about it. One day they will move you and hopefully you will not notice. Or, even better, it will seem like a bunch of new features in a new release.
Short version of the difference, as I’ve been given the knowledge:
X11/X Windowing System is an older system, and still basically works on the CRT paradigm with HBLANK and VBLANK being sacrosanct and real-time. It’s doing transforms from digital to analog and back to digital in today’s world.
Wayland is built for more modern setups, where unoptimized code and excessive memory capacity are the norm, so it renders the whole frame to the GPU at a time and pushes it out, so there’s no concept of scanlines. It’s all just pixels.
Do I understand it right that when it comes down to it, this is a different implementation of the same thing (rendering)? I assume that this is mostly relevant for software engineers and that the end user only notices some differences in speed, if at all?
Basically yes, as far as I know. But some software only works with one or the other (WayDroid only works with Wayland, Cinnamon DE and Hypnotix use X) due to available features.
Very true about the Wayland vs X11 knowledge. I didn’t learn about that until quite a while after startint to use Mint. Even know I don’t really umderstand what it does (something rendering and windows?), it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in day to day use anyways.
You do not need to understand anything about X11 vs Wayland. Use whatever your distro of choice defaults to.
Wayland is the future. Every Linux desktop user not fighting hard to avoid it will be using Wayland in 2 years. The majority are already.
Wayland and X11 are both protocols. They are a way for graphical applications to talk to a “display server” (your graphical desktop).
X11 was invented in the 80’s. Until recently, there was essentially only one surviving implementation on Linux—something called Xorg. While Xorg was the display server, you had to add something called a “window manager” to control what your desktop would look like and how windows would behave.
While Wayland essentially does the same thing as X11, it was built to quite a different set of design criteria. If you have not been part of the history, it is not worth knowing about. Security is one of the big improvements.
Perhaps the only detail worth mentioning is that the display server and window manager functions have been combined in Wayland into something called a “compositor”. So while everybody was using Xorg back in the X11 days, there are many competing compositor implementations in Wayland. They differ not just in how they manage windows but also in how them implement many other details like how to take screenshots, manage multiple monitors, or handle scaling. There are a set of standards that define this behaviour. It is a bit like the web where you have different web browsers and web servers but the same web applications work on all of turn (which perhaps some small differences).
The two systems both “do the same thing” and are quite different at the same time. If you use one, switching to the other may seem painful as things that worked may not anymore and even things that still work may be done differently or require quite different knowledge. Not many people switch from Wayland to X11 but anybody that used Linux 5 years ago has had to switch from X11 to Wayland (or feel pressured to). Not all of them are happy about it. Some of them rely on workflows that Wayland does not yet or many never support. These people consider the switch to Wayland a really big deal which is why you hear about it so much.
But, if you already use Wayland, ignore it. Everybody will stop talking about it soon as almost everybody has switched. The majority that have not switched are using popular desktops like Cinnamon or XFCE that have also not switched. They have not switched as they want to make the transition very seem-less for their users. Which also means you do not have to think about it. One day they will move you and hopefully you will not notice. Or, even better, it will seem like a bunch of new features in a new release.
Short version of the difference, as I’ve been given the knowledge:
X11/X Windowing System is an older system, and still basically works on the CRT paradigm with HBLANK and VBLANK being sacrosanct and real-time. It’s doing transforms from digital to analog and back to digital in today’s world.
Wayland is built for more modern setups, where unoptimized code and excessive memory capacity are the norm, so it renders the whole frame to the GPU at a time and pushes it out, so there’s no concept of scanlines. It’s all just pixels.
Do I understand it right that when it comes down to it, this is a different implementation of the same thing (rendering)? I assume that this is mostly relevant for software engineers and that the end user only notices some differences in speed, if at all?
Basically yes, as far as I know. But some software only works with one or the other (WayDroid only works with Wayland, Cinnamon DE and Hypnotix use X) due to available features.