It's probably better to say that X and Wayland are only responsible for showing something, gnome, kde and other DEs tell you what to show.
X and Wayland are two completely independent solutions for the almost same thing (with a lot of incompatibilities and differences).

Are they really the same thing? I was given to understand that wayland servers are more like window managers than they are like Xorg. Xorg draws things on screen but apparently modern graphical programs do their own drawing via the mesa system.

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I just got SDDM to use Wayland on -current. I'm not one to follow the pack but I actually like Wayland, I just wish it had an equivalent to xorg.conf files (for example, I have to use complex qdbus commands to add extra functionality to my trackball, whereas I could just make a conf file on Xorg).

They are the same KIND of thing, but they do things a bit differently. Written by (mostly) the same developers who have learned a LOT over the last few decades! Some of the issues they could never solve in X.Org have already been solved in Wayland, and some lesser used features have not yet been implemented. IT is already superior to X.Org for some things, and getting better in multiple ways rather quickly.

I would not run Wayland on Debian Stable or RHEL (anything conservative) any more than I would use a new and less supported file system. I would only trust the most current code with all of the fixes in place. I use it on Manjaro, which is just enough back from the cutting edge to prevent bleeding. In the early days I would not even trust it there, but the team has met my need for stability in the operation for the last year and a bit.

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The state of X.org and Wayland in one paragraph

https://www.osnews.com/story/138565/...one-paragraph/

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That was really a horrible web page. If someone wants to make a point, why choose to do so with light gray text (color value about 191 with much pixels having even brighter colors because of antialiasing) on a white (color value 255) background? The title was possible to read as it had a rather black value (34) on the white (255) background and also a rather big font.

This is the kind of web pages that makes normal people look for tools and tricks usually only used by visually impaired people.

regards Henrik

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The web page is fine here

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for those who do not want to click the link, or those with issues reading it there.

What are the features that xorg has that wayland doesn't? Network transparency? So far thats the only gripe. We have VNC and RDP, so I don't care if you can no longer just use Wayland the way xorg was developed to be so network aware. I want to use wayland, but yea I can't only because of NVIDIA. However the days of x/xorg are over. We aren't on the days of mainframes and running a display over the network. All I care about is a proper desktop system without screen tearing - which I am still experiencing of randomly when I scroll through text (vertical tearing), even though I am running NVIDIA as well as running the compositor - only reason I can't use wayland was because when entered KDE through wayland - the session was slow.

What other complaints? Screen recording in Wayland? That seems to have been solved. My problem and worry about Wayland though is that it has already hit 15 years old, and it seems to not be as production ready as it should be, and might be almost as old as x when it is fully properly ready perhaps. At this point the "if it aint broke don't fix it" saying no longer applies here. xorg is broken, and no longer maintainable, I just wish Wayland made more progress than it did in its already 15 years of development - yet however the squabbling about a fscking dedicated icons issue needlessly delays progress.

So if indeed the devs of freedesktop.org is indeed working on wayland, then I surely want them to focus as much as possible on Wayland - and just only provide security updates to xorg, until more distros as well as DE/WM devs have finished their transition to supporting wayland; and you can take this with a grain of salt - but even NVIDIA is coming around to wayland support.

xorg is broken and breaking even more; wayland is the fix at this point - and 15 years to me at this point is no longer - 'oh well its shiny and new' , for me 15 years should be a sign of maturity - sadly though with wayland with some squabbling earlier and the current state isn't quite the case in some ways.

Again, me personally I don't give two shits about network transparency - if I need something of that effect as I stated we already got RDP and VNC; all I care about - is having a proper desktop without any screen tearing of any kind; the days of the VAX is over, it has been over for a while - local DRM / 2d / 3d rendering has been a thing for years now... get with the times; xorg is crusty - let it die.

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Do you use firefox to view the page? Can you attach any screenshot of the web page?

regards Henrik

Of course Sir !
(Yes, I use Firefox)

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And yet more pointless in-fighting which is slowing things down, at this rate lets wait another 15 years and wayland will be 30 yrs old, yay!

X has some dumb-client support (and minimal X client support) features built-in that are seldom used anymore. I have worked in shops where they were critical! That said, If I worked there now I would be locking in X.ORG or migrating to a different solution.

X has some support for features of different windows managers and desktop manager features. This is one of the things that could not be ripped out without breaking a lot, but that really does not belong in the windowing system itself. Wayland supports such features by allowing shims and modules properly, without weighing down all of the systems that do not require them. Desktop managers that need those services much actively set the requirement for it on Wayland, where they could just ASSUME it on X.Org. Avoiding that loading down adds performance advantages to Wayland in many installations (Mine, for one), and makes it FAR easier to maintain!

Remember when the Linux kernel went from being a monolithic monster to supporting runtime loadable modules? I lived through that and it made life better. We have lived through the birth of something like that for the desktop, and it will make life better! It is not all the way done yet, but it is good!

I am even that is easily solved by something as a pi as they are as powerful enough to perhaps at this point to render such a thing obsolete.

Perhaps, but from my point of view I am just a mere humble desktop Linux user. I use what works, and even I as someone who isn't all that advanced of a user in my opinion , though I use Slackware - have no need for such features and I just want a modern implementation from the ground up that is meant for this. X11 wasn't, I am sure that even you know and do not need to watch the retrobytes video in my last post...

We aren't, and tl;dw that video points out that X/X11 from the ground up was never meant for a local running of windows and rendering, it was meant for over-the-network; well again we have machines now that are powerful enough (since the 90s), to have direct rendering 2d/3d , and the codebase for X without a major re-write can only do so much and is no longer maintainable, this is why we have wayland.

Maybe I am misunderstanding or coming to the wrong conclusion, but isn't the Linux kernel still technically a monolithic kernel? It is though modular, so you can load what you need and don't need. Also I don't care about essentially rehashing the debate between what Tannenbaum and Torvalds argued - in the end Tannenbaum lost , because nobody is using minix at the scale Linux is being used - just like also how GNU/HURD is just a joke. I don't also mean to go into tangent, but the point is - I just want something that works - yes X just worked for me technically and thats fine, but even I am running into issues with X, and the fact that even running NVIDIA with a compositor and I still see tearing (not on video oddly enough), but when scrolling through text, at this point it is unacceptable.

Also I am now at the age where I don't care anymore, if it works great. This is why I'll never use a "libre" distro, sorry but those distros are a joke, unless you have old hardware , great - but yea there is also a reason even Debian included wifi drivers. While also I do not use Wayland as of yet , that doesn't mean I won't be in the future, I want it to succeed - remember when we had Mir briefly? And if I'm not mistaken something other than Mir, or was it just Mir - I don't recall - but yea, I do not want to go through that again. I don't want another wasted few years to end up back at X, and this time so much time has passed that X is REALLY showing its age.

-edit

Also when as say "when we had Mir briefly", I did not mean Slackware - but jsut in general in the Linux world. Yea how did that work out again? Wayland at this point is more inevitable than ever, unless you are OpenBSD literally maintaining your own fork X downstream, because as far as I know even FreeBSD has now documentation on wayland in the manual (I can't speak for NetBSD though).

Ultimately this conversation was moot before it began. As I've pointed out many times before X is simply better than wayland. Let's hold the discussions about deprecating X until wayland based desktops can boast parity on both features AND performance.

I would much rather discuss the development process of kwin_wayland from the perspective of its flaws when compared to kwin_x11. Complaining about how old and crappy X is counter productive and doesn't benefit wayland in any way, shape, or form.

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