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Wayland is kind of unique in that it is deliberately, intentionally impossible to run applications written for any other window system on top of it. All the oth
by makomk 6y ago
Wayland is kind of unique in that it is deliberately, intentionally impossible to run applications written for any other window system on top of it. All the others are pretty well cross-compatible - Win32 applications can run on X11 and vice-versa with an appropriate compatibility shim, both can run on OS X just fine too, and in theory OS X apps could probably run on other platforms if anyone cared to develop the code to do it, but none of them can run under Wayland. By design. The only reason XWayland works is because every Wayland compositor currently bypasses the limited Wayland APIs and implements a large chunk of X-specific code to enable it, and if they ever get tired of maintaining that say goodbye to compatibility with any existing pre-Wayland GUI applications regardless of original platform.
- cycloptic 6y agoA solution there would just be to add a similar large chunk of Wine-specific code, which could be an option now if none of the other options work. There is no real other way to do it if the other window systems are going to break the security assumptions in Wayland. Edit: AFAIK the only real reason X11 needs special support is because functionality that would normally be provided by an X window manager needs to be provided by the Wayland compositor, most of the heavy lifting translating the X11 protocol is done out-of-process in XWayland. The amount of code needed there on the Wayland server side is actually not particularly large, I don't know enough about all usages of the Win32 API to say how that compares.