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 :)
Before Wayland, there was X Window System, created in 1984. X Window System was designed in a time where you had one good computer connected to multiple displays used by different people. X went through many versions but version 11 (X11) stayed around for a long time.
But the architecture just isn’t good. It wasn’t designed for modern needs. MacOS used to use X, but replaced it to fit modern needs. Windows didn’t use X, but they too updated Windows to fit modern needs. But Linux and other OSs stuck with X for a lot longer, hacking it to make it work. Honestly, it’s amazing how well it does work.
But isn’t not great. It wasn’t designed with security in mind, it doesn’t do multi-monitor well. Behind the scenes, it considers everything to be one giant display; issues arise when it comes to mixed-dpi displays and when monitor refresh rates don’t match. It’s also just a bloated, old code base that people don’t want to work on. Fixing X would not only be difficult, but would break compatibility.
So people got working on a modern replacement for X aiming to avoid its issues. Wayland is leaner, more opinionated, and designed for how modern hardware operates. Wayland itself is just a protocol (like X11), and there’s many different implementations of that protocol: Mutter, Kwin, wlroots, smithay, Mir, Weston, etc. Meanwhile X11 pretty much only had one relevant implementation, Xorg. Wayland’s diversity has its pros and cons. Pros include (1) you can create your implementation in any programming language you want rather than being stuck to just one, (2) an implementation can fill just the needs on the person making it rather than trying to generalize it for everyone. But cons include the fact that this fragmentation leads to scenarios where one implementation supports something that others don’t and implementation-specific bugs.
Wayland’s opinionated design is also draws criticisms. It gives a lot of control to the compositors rather than windows, which is how Xorg, MacOS, and Windows work. Nvidia’s wayland adoption was also slow and terrible. It took many years to get it into the only decent shape it’s in now.
Excellant write up, thank you.
I’m not exactly sure what ‘opinionated’ means in terms of software, could you (or anyone who sees this) define it?
One opinion that Wayland has is that the client is responsible for decorating its window. It draws its own title bar, shadow around the window, and the cursor.
Though not everybody was happy with this. A few protocols were created that lets clients tell the compositor to draw decorations around the window and the cursor.
But still, every app needs to support those client side decorations and cursors because not all compositors support those protocols. Gnome notably doesn’t, they like client side decorations.
Thanks for the interesting write up! Why does Nvidia have to “adopt” Wayland? Is it not just fundamentally drawing some textures into some rectangles?
Unfortunately not. There’s been a number of things on Nvdia’s side that slowed down Wayland adoption.
They didn’t always support Xwayland hardware acceleration.
Nvidia pushed for a technology called EGLStreams while everyone else agreed on GBM. So the desktop stack had to support both. Nvidia eventually relented and started supporting GBM.
Nvidia didn’t support VRR or night light for a while.
Nvidia didn’t support necessary stuff for Gamescope to function properly.
And overall Nvidia on Wayland was just buggy. I remember that many games failed to launch or had weird performance issues. But those issues just went away when I got an AMD card.
But things are in a much better state today. Though I did recently test a 20 series card on Fedora 41 and it was a terrible experience on the proprietary drivers. But when speaking with orhers, they didn’t share my issues.
Why does Nvidia need to support night light? Can’t someone from Wayland just write a simple shader in any shader language that does colour adjustments and apply it to the desktop?
This reads like an AI response to me.
Mac OS has never used X11 as a primary display system. Apple had a version they supplied with older Mac OS X versions for people using older Unix applications (and half-arsed ports) but that’s been unsupported since 2012. You can install the modern “XQuartz” open source equivalent, but it’s still secondary.
Humorously, X11 is like driving a 1990 Honda Accord. It was built ages ago, but with enough care, it still runs just fine.
The good news? Over time, you’ve bolted on all sorts of modern conveniences: GPS, Bluetooth, maybe even a backup camera—but at the end of the day, it’s all just stuff you crammed in. Underneath, it’s still the same old car. It’s reliable, it gets great gas mileage despite the half a million miles on the odometer, and it’ll start even when it’s buried under a foot of snow. Sure, it takes some effort to pass emissions, but at least every mechanic knows how to fix it, and parts are cheap.
Now for the bad news. Anyone with a flathead screwdriver can take it for a joyride whenever they feel like it. You keep finding it parked in weird places, but hey, at least they always bring it back. The airbags? They might work, but there’s only one way to find out. And let’s be honest—most modern cars have surpassed it in every possible way.
The best part? It’s been paid off for decades. No one is just going to hand you a brand-new car because that would take a ton of money and effort. No matter how much you tinker with it, it’s still a 1990 Honda Accord. You can throw on some new tires, upgrade the suspension, and maybe swap out the brakes, but at the end of the day, it’s never going to have that brand new car feel.
One thing to note with X11’s design, having a server and client, there was nothing requiring both to be on the same machine. You could run an X11 client on your local machine, ssh into a remote machine and use its X11 server.
Lets say you are home and can ssh into a work server. You could run Firefox on the work machine, using it’s network and have the visual parts show up on your home computer.
This was very much a Unix, shared resource style design. Servers and thin clients. Put all your horse power in the big machine and connect using your crappy low power system to it.
Keep in mind that in practice this didn’t work that well, it wasn’t very efficient at displaying modern interfaces over the network. Showing a simple text editor over LAN worked fine, but using Firefox from another place was quite spotty.
Oddly I think the only cases I ever used it where I was connecting to my home computer from outside my house was when I needed to connect to my router’s webpage. SSH to my home computer and then pull up the browser to open a port on my DMZ or other such nonsense.
When at home and just using LAN bandwidth it was to run lesser programs.
I realize not using this model was intentional with Wayland, but I wish it had something similar.
Back than I tried this. The performance was horrible, even on a good connection. It was barely tolerable on LAN, but over the Internet … no. Just no. There were and are better solution for accessing a remote machine.
It was fine when rendering (esp. text) was server side and not client side like it is now. At least LAN (10MB ethernet) was basically transparent. Internet was shit mainly because everyone was on 56k modems.
GTK and Qt do all their rendering client side and transfer bitmaps to the server requiring much more bandwidth.
Ca. 20 years ago I worked for a company that used X forwarding for their backup management system (a Java application running on one of the servers) which somewhat worked on their wired LAN (at least most some of the time).
This was just unreliable and slow and had issues left and right.
- X11 is the displayer server, a real process running on your computer.
- X11 window managers are clients to that server. It communicates with the server and tells it where to draw the windows.
- A desktop environment is a window manager plus a whole suite of other applications and processes that a common computer user would expect.
A window manager and display server are the bare minimum of the x11 graphical environment. Desktop environment is draw the rest of the owl.
Wayland is is a completely different beast than x11. There is no Wayland program, just a wide set of protocols. There are no Wayland window managers, just “compositors”. Compositors are responsible for everything both the display server and window manager would do in x11. Everything is up to the compositor to implement. It just has to follow the Wayland protocols.
This can make migrating to Wayland a bit tricky. If a program worked in one x11 window manager, it was basically guaranteed to work in all window managers becuase it was always communicating to the same X server directly. In Wayland that’s not guaranteed. If a compositor didn’t (or didn’t correctly) implement a certain subset of protocols then the utility wouldn’t work correctly.
IE take xrandr and wlr-randr. They both are a , “display settings” CLI utility. xrandr works on any x11 environment because it always communicates with x11. wlr-randr only works if the compositor implements the wlr_output_management_unstable_v1 protocol. See the protocol deifnition here
I won’t bother going into technical details about x11 and wayland since other people already explained it much better than i ever could, but basically wayland is supposed to be replacing x11, because the codebase is so old now that it has become very hard to maintain and implement new features without breaking things. A window manager pretty much only handles the placement of windows on the screen, and you have to use seperate applications for setting a wallpaper, getting notifications, application launcher, etc. Whereas a desktop environment is a fully fledged out of the box experience. I personally really like window managers because i like the workflow of tiling window managers in particular, which places the windows in a predefined layout for you. Something that might be a bit confusing is that window managers on wayland are called compositors, which is because in wayland the window manager also has to do it’s own compositing. In x11 you could use something like picom, which is a seperate compositor program that you could use to add graphical effects to any window manager, but on wayland this doesn’t exist and the window manager has to implement its own compositing.
A shorter take: x11 is old, and big, and didn’t originally consider security much at all.
Wayland is newer, therefore lacking some bells and whistles of x11 that some x11 users may still care about, but also designed with more awareness of security issues - making it more extensible and maintainable into the future.
There was a time Wayland wasn’t a great x11 replacement due to its level of development. When it will become the better choice all depends on what kind of user you are, but it seems inevitable to become the better choice for most users in the future.
