4 ms·
From what I read on reddit, Xwayland is X running within wayland, and (for some reason) needs some special code in the drivers. I'm not fully clear as to why or
by ollien 9y ago
From what I read on reddit, Xwayland is X running within wayland, and (for some reason) needs some special code in the drivers. I'm not fully clear as to why or what needs to change.
- majewsky 9y agoThe motivation for Xwayland is that 1. a lot of applications use no GUI frameworks (or outdated versions thereof, e.g. all these apps that are still on Qt 4), so if the frameworks are ported to Wayland, it doesn't help them. And 2. a lot of applications talk to X directly even if using a framework (e.g. an application that takes a screenshot needs to use xlib or xcb directly because that's typically not abstracted by a GUI framework). Xwayland enables these types of applications to continue working in a Wayland session, so that desktops and distributions can move to Wayland without having to either wait on the legacy applications or remove them from the distribution.
- d33 9y agoCouldn't those just be recompiled with a wrapper that maps X calls to Wayland?
- josteink 9y agoYou mean like xwayland?
- lotyrin 9y agoAFAICT XWayland is a server that speaks the X protocol and not an Xlib replacement compatibility layer that emulates X11 client+server in-process and speaks Wayland protocol (though, I imagine various mismatches prevents that sort of thing from working well at all).