[Linux.conf.au 2013] - The real story behind Wayland and X

Please have a look at an X maintainers very own presentation: ▶ this video Wayland is not a middle man as it is the compositor itself as well - it does the minimal amount of work necessary to compose the desktop. X on the other hand just transfers messages between clients and the compositor without doing any actual work (x render functions are almost never used by modern applications)

I tried to give a hint about the basic reason of trying to get out from under the weight of a huge code base that had become old and crufty while the very architecture it was designed around was becoming moot since things were shifting to client side rendering already. Couldn't find a good article on short notice, but there's a decent video from back in 2013 about it. ▶ this video

Here you are: ▶ this video It’s a great presentation by one of the guys behind wayland, who worked on X a lot before. Basically, X has a fundamentally misaligned abstraction of the underlying hardware - which is expected based on its age. When used with a compositor, it is basically a middle-man with no function whatsoever. So Wayland decided to cut out the middle man and pass events directly between client and compositor. But please watch the video, I think it will answer all your questions. Also, it’s not like X will be totally deprecated, XWayland is an API implementation of it that will be supported forever.

Here's a decade-old talk on Wayland ▶ this video Wayland has been the default on Fedora and Arch w/ GNOME since around 2018, 5 years ago. It became the default on Debian w/ GNOME in 2019, 4 years ago. So yes, long time coming. KDE took longer but it's now finally ready.

One of the arguments made by the Wayland spec folks (many of whom were involved in Xorg development for many years) is that the Xorg spec is also a major cause of problems with modern Linux graphics[1]. [1]: ▶ this video

> However it's the lack of network transparency which stops me from using Wayland in the foreseeable future. X is not network transparent, and hasn't been for a long time. ▶ this video