> On Linux it is actually the window server that provides > the interface between applications and the video driver. This hasn't been true for a long, long t

> On Linux it is actually the window server that provides > the interface between applications and the video driver. This hasn't been true for a long, long time. Modern Linux applications directly call into the graphics driver, either through OpenGL or an intermediate library such as Clutter. > This means that every driver needs to interface with > each of the window managers. This is also not true. Window managers are driver-independent, and you can easily write your own window manager without any knowledge of the underlying hardware. You might mean "display server" instead of "window manager", but there's only one display server used in Linux, and that is X11. X11 was designed in an era before standardized graphics or input APIs, so it doesn't use OpenGL. As a result, it needs its own set of drivers for nearly everything (keyboards, mice, graphics, overlays). That's why Linux graphics drivers need to have special X11 support. Wayland and Mir are an attempt to replace X11 with a much thinner layer, handling only the bare necessities of getting the driver and user application together so they can talk OpenGL together.