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Ask HN: What is the misunderstood difference between X-Windows and Wayland?
From what I understand Wayland has been slow to gain adoption because it doesn't provide some necessary capabilities that X11 provides to application developers out of the box.
My understanding is that application developers are required to write these themselves and that not all developers have the inclination or the resources to do them.
The analogy I can make is with the Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer which provided standardized interfaces to device drivers so developers wouldn't have to deal directly with the quirks of the devices themselves. Microsoft set a standard or some requirements they had to fulfill and device manufactures had to meet those standards for them to be to Windows "certified".
In this case instead of Wayland providing a standard application interface developers can write for, the application developers have to deal with window elements at a lower level.
Can anyone explain to me what the fundamental differences between X11 and Wayland in this respect?
What newer better features is it meant to provide, or what problems is it meant to solve or address in relation to X11 and why should it take so long?
Wayland has been in development for 17 years now. I and I suspect a lot of others too don't understand how something so fundamental to desktop usage is still not ready to be used "out of the box", so to speak after so many years. If it was a part-time project mostly being done by volunteers in their spare time that would be understood, but it has received corporate backing over the years, apparently being something corporations are ready to bank on.
There is no doubt that if it was a fully corporate project it would have been canned years ago, but somehow some corporate backers have been willing to keep it going because of the large component of volunteers involved and it gives them an presence in the free software environment.
Is the "delay" (if that is a good way to describe the situation) due to technical challenges, wrong turns, inadequate resources, complexity or any of the other issues that affect software projects?
I've read a few blog posts over the years about problems developing for Wayland eg https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html, though I acknowledge that things may have improved since then.
Right now I just want to go back in time to 2007 understand what it is [sic] at its core at its inception and how meaningful its goals however distant make it an alternative to X11 - what makes it a candidate for its corporate support.
I'm getting the HTML5 vs Flash vibes, when instead of opening up Flash and cleaning it up or creating a more secure open source alternative, corporate agendas preferred to go for HTML5 which in my view was never a proper substitute for what Flash accomplished. Guys please don't let this comment be a major digression.
I just want to understand it technically from nuts and bolts upwards. Some comprehensive diagrams comparing with X11, Windows and macOS would help.
- PaulHoule 2y agoI think basically it is like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model except Microsoft had that up and running in 2006 but politics has kept Linux from doing the same. Specifically, WDDM and Wayland simplify the graphics interface to an API that lets you blast out a rectangle of pixels so unlike the old HAL model you weren't specifying an API where it can draw primitives like lines and circles, the API allows user-space applications to run software on the GPU to make pixel rectangles that either get blasted to the screen or composited. Microsoft is really good at maintaining backwards compatible with the UI (I can still run Office '97 on my PC) and they figured out how to make it so old applications don't know what happened. Incompetence at GUI work is a hallmark of the politics of Linux, just as power management "just not working" is a hallmark of the politics of the Intel-Microsoft-Dell alliance.
- vfclists 2y agoThanks According to this Wikipedia description of a window manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager, would it be fair to say that Wayland doesn't perform the role of a Window Manager very well, among other things? What is the equivalent component of X11 that Wayland targeted at its initial inception? It looks me to me that there has been a lot of deceptive promotion around Wayland, because something that was conceived foundation for a not as yet developed window management system was presented as windows management system. It even makes one wonder if all the people who have been promoting and touting its benefits know what it actually was. It sounds a bit like promising a car when all you are focused on are the engine and the chassis.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y agoAll this theorizing :) Why don't you try it out for yourself, and get first hand experience in how it works, and feels? By installing some Linux Distribution which supports it, and offering different desktop environments running on top of wayland? For me, with current Plasma/KDE this has reached a state which feels almost like the golden days of KDE3 at its peak. Or even more so, because way more powerful hardware now. In practice this means the desktop environment itself, and any applications which support running in/on/for that 'toolkit' run ultrasmooth without a running X-Server. For 'legacy' X-applications which don't, a thing called X-Wayland is seamlessly started, and they run under that, also seamlessly. That should happen the same way under current Gnome, but I havn't tested that so far. Anyways, stuff like Gimp, Inkscape run absolutely stressfree this way. Everything I really need, like Firefox or derivative, Chrome, Chromium or derivatives, mpv runs absolutely smooth. Firefox in one tab playing 1080p youtube for music without noticable load or stuttering, while having up to hundreds of other tabs open. Doing other stuff, reading pdfs, torturing LibreOffice, updating the distro, discovering what's there, and so on. Since about a week. No crashes. No glitches. Watching movies with VLC in Full-HD(1080p) also absolutely smooth, though I'm not sure about VLC supporting wayland right now. Doesn't matter, it worked. Everything (I tried) just works. All of this on rather obsolete hardware, a Kaby Lake core i5-7500t with HD630 iGPU, which can be bought refurbished with 32GB RAM and some SSD for about 200 to 250$/€ at the moment in form of a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q tiny or similar. I'd guess it can only get better with later hardware if the (i)GPU is from Intel because the driver situation is excellent. Don't know about AMD, should work too. Know nothing about NVIDIA at all. edit: I should add that I reverted to things like FVWM2 and IceWM, or XFCE at the most, after the catastrophe that happened to KDE after 3, or Gnome with 3. So I wouldn't give a shit about wayland, because why? But that Plasma stuff feels really comfy now. And it doesn't matter that it is running on wayland, without X. It just works. edititagain: One more thing to add, while doing this all the cores mostly 'idled' at 800 to 900Mhz, rarely peaking 1.0 to 1.1Ghz, because I set the powerprofile to powersave, by just moving the slider to the left in the Plasma gadget. So apart from the 32GB RAM that machine isn't just 'obsolete', but intentionally underpowered. Still supersmooth. (...cackling madly...)