Differences between Wayland and X11

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aside from the obvious, wayland being the default choice on all relevant distros and DEs and being continously worked on, evermore projects switching to it (WINE most recently) whilst X11 is in maintenance-mode, the main thing for me and my deployed fleet is if you're running a modern laptop, say with a 1080p or better screen, wayland is a must. primarily because of the output (UI scaling, effortless multi-monitor dock/undock) and the input (touchpad gestures, touch screens).

if your world is a desktop with a mouse and, say, XFCE, then you have very few of these things intruding on you and you can't really understand the benefits.

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I won't bother going into technical details about x11 and wayland since other people already explained it much better than i ever could, but basically wayland is supposed to be replacing x11, because the codebase is so old now that it has become very hard to maintain and implement new features without breaking things. A window manager pretty much only handles the placement of windows on the screen, and you have to use seperate applications for setting a wallpaper, getting notifications, application launcher, etc. Whereas a desktop environment is a fully fledged out of the box experience. I personally really like window managers because i like the workflow of tiling window managers in particular, which places the windows in a predefined layout for you. Something that might be a bit confusing is that window managers on wayland are called compositors, which is because in wayland the window manager also has to do it's own compositing. In x11 you could use something like picom, which is a seperate compositor program that you could use to add graphical effects to any window manager, but on wayland this doesn't exist and the window manager has to implement its own compositing.

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it’s never going to have that brand new car feel.

Worse excuse to write new code, but Wayland does seem to be a good example of rewritting.

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This reads like an AI response to me.

Mac OS has never used X11 as a primary display system. Apple had a version they supplied with older Mac OS X versions for people using older Unix applications (and half-arsed ports) but that’s been unsupported since 2012. You can still install the modern “XQuartz” open source equivalent.

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A shorter take: x11 is old, and big, and didn't originally consider security much at all.

Wayland is newer, therefore lacking some bells and whistles of x11 that some x11 users may still care about, but also designed with more awareness of security issues - making it more extensible and maintainable into the future.

There was a time Wayland wasn't a great x11 replacement due to its level of development. When it will become the better choice all depends on what kind of user you are, but it seems inevitable to become the better choice for most users in the future.

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Not AI.

My bad on the Apple part.

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That looks like a great solution, will have to try it out.

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Oddly I think the only cases I ever used it where I was connecting to my home computer from outside my house was when I needed to connect to my router's webpage. SSH to my home computer and then pull up the browser to open a port on my DMZ or other such nonsense.

When at home and just using LAN bandwidth it was to run lesser programs.

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Why does Nvidia need to support night light?

They don't, but they needed to support the KMS API for applying lookup tables to the image sent to the screen - desktops relied on that functionality without a fallback, so when it wasn't available, you just didn't get the feature.

Can't someone from Wayland just write a simple shader in any shader language that does colour adjustments and apply it to the desktop?

There's no such thing as "someone from Wayland", just the developers of the DEs (well, the project is named after a town, but I'm sure that's not what you meant).

But, yes, you can use a shader. We implemented that in KWin and we're using it when the driver or hardware doesn't support the functionality we need... but that has a noticeable performance impact, so it's still necessary for the driver to support it natively.

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It was fine when rendering (esp. text) was server side and not client side like it is now. At least LAN (10MB ethernet) was basically transparent. Internet was shit mainly because everyone was on 56k modems.

GTK and Qt do all their rendering client side and transfer bitmaps to the server requiring much more bandwidth.

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Differences between Wayland and X11