Differences between Wayland and X11

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Excellant write up, thank you.

I'm not exactly sure what 'opinionated' means in terms of software, could you (or anyone who sees this) define it?

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Humorously, X11 is like driving a 1990 Honda Accord. It was built ages ago, but with enough care, it still runs just fine.

The good news? Over time, you’ve bolted on all sorts of modern conveniences: GPS, Bluetooth, maybe even a backup camera—but at the end of the day, it’s all just stuff you crammed in. Underneath, it’s still the same old car. It’s reliable, it gets great gas mileage despite the half a million miles on the odometer, and it’ll start even when it’s buried under a foot of snow. Sure, it takes some effort to pass emissions, but at least every mechanic knows how to fix it, and parts are cheap.

Now for the bad news. Anyone with a flathead screwdriver can take it for a joyride whenever they feel like it. You keep finding it parked in weird places, but hey, at least they always bring it back. The airbags? They might work, but there’s only one way to find out. And let’s be honest—most modern cars have surpassed it in every possible way.

The best part? It’s been paid off for decades. No one is just going to hand you a brand-new car because that would take a ton of money and effort. No matter how much you tinker with it, it’s still a 1990 Honda Accord. You can throw on some new tires, upgrade the suspension, and maybe swap out the brakes, but at the end of the day, it’s never going to have that brand new car feel.

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Thanks for the interesting write up! Why does Nvidia have to "adopt" Wayland? Is it not just fundamentally drawing some textures into some rectangles?

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For your second question, a window manager is the specific system that controls the placement of windows on an X11 desktop.

On a X11 based system, X11 is the windowing system (interacting with the video card) and a window manager is a system sitting on top of that laying out the windows and interacting with the user and other programmes. It is a separate programme on top of the X11 system, and communicates with X11, and X11 is the programme that communicates with the graphics card.

On Wayland, instead of 2 separate systems there can be 1 combined windowing systen that is both the window manager but also directly communicates with the hardware in a standardised way using the Wayland protocols. This is called a Wayland compositor.

Meanwhile a desktop environment is the whole desktop - that includes a window manager or compositor but also lots of other tools and software that together make a full desktop experience.

An example is KDE - KDE is a full desktop environment. It uses its own x11 window manger called kwin (and also able to be a wayland compositor), but it also uses a whole range of other tools alongside that to give you panels, widgets, desktop icons, a clock, menus, settings etc collectively forming Plasma desktop. And then on top of Plasma there is a whole range of bespoke programmes that form the full deskop experience - like Dolphin (file manager), Kate (text editor) and so on. All that software is designed to work seamlessly with the KDE family of tools and systems. The window manager, the desktop tools and the other programmes together form the whole desktop environment. But other desktop environments software will also work - for example Gnome based software can also run with KDE without issue and vice versa.

Gnome has its own window manager/compositor, and it's own widgets and tools to make a desktop, and it's own bespoke software to make a whole desktop environment.

And there are many others.

So in summary:

Window Manager - the specific system that controls the placment and look of the individual windows talking to X11 which then talks to the hardware
Wayland Compositor - the system that controls the placement and look of windows, using wayland protocols to speak to the hardware
Desktop Environment - the whole desktop including the Window manager but also lots of other programmes and tools that form the basic desktop (such as a panel, menus, desktop icons) and the whole environment (other software like a file manager, text editor, calculator etc). KDE and Gnome are examples of popular desktop environments

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One opinion that Wayland has is that the client is responsible for decorating its window. It draws its own title bar, shadow around the window, and the cursor.

Though not everybody was happy with this. A few protocols were created that lets clients tell the compositor to draw decorations around the window and the cursor.

But still, every app needs to support those client side decorations and cursors because not all compositors support those protocols. Gnome notably doesn’t, they like client side decorations.

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Unfortunately not. There’s been a number of things on Nvdia’s side that slowed down Wayland adoption.

They didn’t always support Xwayland hardware acceleration.

Nvidia pushed for a technology called EGLStreams while everyone else agreed on GBM. So the desktop stack had to support both. Nvidia eventually relented and started supporting GBM.

Nvidia didn’t support VRR or night light for a while.

Nvidia didn’t support necessary stuff for Gamescope to function properly.

And overall Nvidia on Wayland was just buggy. I remember that many games failed to launch or had weird performance issues. But those issues just went away when I got an AMD card.

But things are in a much better state today. Though I did recently test a 20 series card on Fedora 41 and it was a terrible experience on the proprietary drivers. But when speaking with orhers, they didn’t share my issues.

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One thing to note with X11's design, having a server and client, there was nothing requiring both to be on the same machine. You could run an X11 client on your local machine, ssh into a remote machine and use its X11 server.

Lets say you are home and can ssh into a work server. You could run Firefox on the work machine, using it's network and have the visual parts show up on your home computer.

This was very much a Unix, shared resource style design. Servers and thin clients. Put all your horse power in the big machine and connect using your crappy low power system to it.

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Why does Nvidia need to support night light? Can't you just write a simple shader in any shader language that does colour adjustments?

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I realize not using this model was intentional with Wayland, but I wish it had something similar.

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The Nvidia driver didn’t support some protocol that AMD/Intel did that was used by desktops for the night light.

Yes, they could have made the night light work. But why would they when Nvidia said the feature was coming soon? Well it turned out that soon was taking a very long time and eventually KDE actually did create a special night light implementation just for Nvidia. The problem was that it was a hack that had extra overhead. And in the end the hack didn’t get shipped because Nvidia finally starting supporting the protocol.

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I've never tried it, but there's Waypipe.

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Keep in mind that in practice this didn't work that well, it wasn't very efficient at displaying modern interfaces over the network. Showing a simple text editor over LAN worked fine, but using Firefox from another place was quite spotty.

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Back than I tried this. The performance was horrible, even on a good connection. It was barely tolerable on LAN, but over the Internet ... no. Just no. There were and are better solution for accessing a remote machine.

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But I would rather have 1990 Honda Accord than a new car. But I would take Wayland over X ahah

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and you can't use a shortcut for gnome-pie on wayland the workaround is a command line and opens a fullscreen window

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Hey, sorry to take adantage of your answer, perhaps you can help me out though.

Is dbus actually necessary for xdg-desktop-portal? I understand from this flatpak post that xdg-desktop-portal is actually a bunch of d-bus interconnections, which of course make d-bus fundamental for xdg-desktop-portal, but wanted to confirm. xdg-desktop-portal is a must on wayland if one wants to share screen through webrtc, or electron apps like slack or teams-for-linux (probably zoom which is Qt as well). But I've read some people (this for example) start sway from console without d-bus, without logind/systemd, just seatd on the background (wlroots and sway support seatd). So perhaps those people are not interested on sharing screen, I don't know. Or perhaps such d-bus plumbing is only required for flatpaks apps, which are sandboxed, thus requiring all that interconnection to access resources and such, and then I'm not sure about a thing...

Thanks !

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Every mechanic does not know how to fix x11, and cannot fix it without extensive knowledge.

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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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Differences between Wayland and X11