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.
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.