Differences between Wayland and X11

[stevetech@programming.dev]

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

[qaz@lemmy.world]

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.

[dirk@lemmy.ml]

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.

[britishj@lemmy.world]

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

[kusivittula@sopuli.xyz]

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

[kixik@lemmy.ml]

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 !

[lemmus@szmer.info]

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

[dingdongitsabear@lemmy.ml]

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.

[juipeltje@lemmy.world]

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.

[0x0@programming.dev]

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.

[guy_threepwood@lemmy.world]

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.

[mangocats@feddit.it]

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.

[that_leaflet@lemmy.world]

Not AI.

My bad on the Apple part.