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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Differences between Wayland and X11 (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I stumbled upon this post regarding an earlier rant about wayland, but now it seems fine, according to the author.

After using Linux for nearly 5 years, using both depending on distros defaults, I have to admit that I never got the core/main/game changing differences between wayland and x11.

To be said, that I also dont do fancy linux things other than basic sysadmin stuff and from time to time repair the mess my curiosity left behind.

Could somebody explain the differences between those two and afterwards maybe also say some words about what this has to do with the difference between window managers and desktop environments?

I am also happy about links to good blog posts or stuff, that target this very questions (as long as the questions make sence of course). Thanks beforehand :)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Wayland is a from scratch redesign on how to display things on Linux to get rid of a huge amount of technical debt of x11.

As always with such a huge undertaking, there are a lot of speedbumps on the read that you can't see beforehand. And at every speedbump people cried that wayland was a mistake and we just should go back to x11 because it worked good enough.

We now reached the point where wayland has (almost?) feature parity with x11, that's why now more and more distro deprecate x11 to be unsupported some undetermined point in the future.

[–] azvasKvklenko 3 points 5 hours ago

Don't forget that at this point X11 doesn’t have feature parity with Wayland more than the other way around. Mixed DPIs, refresh rates, multi-display VRR, virtual screen resolutions, nested compositing, direct scan-out, GPU hot plugging, DRM leasing, HDR are all exclusive or at least better on Wayland.