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Linux gui applications historically have used X11 for desktop window management (think how your windows layer on top of each other). Wayland is a new ecosystem

Linux gui applications historically have used X11 for desktop window management (think how your windows layer on top of each other). Wayland is a new ecosystem that aims to take over for X11 (as X11 was developed in mind with a lot of functionality that many do not care about, and just want a desktop environment). But it's a controversial effort, and Wayland still doesn't support a lot of the functionality even from the desktop perspective. Wine is not something that lets you (just) play games, it is effectively a re-implementation of windows low level apis, on top of linux. It lets you call the dlls, and kernel functions, effectively running windows applications in linux. The wine community is opinionated, and effectively weren't going to support Wayland; because it has some shortcomings in terms of api surface or ways that wayland handles things. Someone decided to try to support wayland anyway.

kaba0 4y ago
> X11 for desktop window management (think how your windows layer on top of each other) That’s not really the primary job of these protocols - they are primarily about interfacing with GUI apps and displaying their content — compositing those contents on top of each other in one way or another is the job of a window manager, which can be in-built, or separate from the display server. > Wayland still doesn't support a lot of the functionality even from the desktop perspective This has been less and less true. Plenty, or even most distros ship with wayland by default and people don’t even realize it. Under gnome which is arguably the most complete implementation I really have a hard time listing things that don’t work.
Gigachad 4y ago
It’s less a shortcoming of the wayland api, and more that they didn’t want to implement bad ideas in the protocol with the only use case being windows api compatibility.

kaba0 4y ago

> X11 for desktop window management (think how your windows layer on top of each other) That’s not really the primary job of these protocols - they are primarily about interfacing with GUI apps and displaying their content — compositing those contents on top of each other in one way or another is the job of a window manager, which can be in-built, or separate from the display server. > Wayland still doesn't support a lot of the functionality even from the desktop perspective This has been less and less true. Plenty, or even most distros ship with wayland by default and people don’t even realize it. Under gnome which is arguably the most complete implementation I really have a hard time listing things that don’t work.

Gigachad 4y ago

It’s less a shortcoming of the wayland api, and more that they didn’t want to implement bad ideas in the protocol with the only use case being windows api compatibility.