I cannot wait until this lands in most distros. So much of the Wayland noise will go away.
this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Can someone please eli5? Why do I never hear anything about the window manager in windows and macos? Why is all the fuss on our side on Linux? I'm genuinely asking.
In addition to what the others have said, windows has already had its big paradigm change ("similar" to the change from x11 to Wayland that is happening) in the past. It was around 2007 with windows Vista. They also didn't get it quite right on the first try, but because Microsoft can do whatever they want, and in Linux you must convince the community that something is better, it was easier for them to just change everything under everyone's nose.
A compositor is a program responsible for displaying program windows and things like the desktop on your PC. On Linux, the compositor is just a program that starts when the system starts. There are multiple desktop environments available, like Plasma or Gnome, each comes with their own compositor, you can choose which you want to use.
Wayland is a protocol that the programs use to communicate with the compositor. Everyone decided to use Wayland, because if each compositor had their own protocol it would be silly, eg some programs would work only on Plasma or Gnome.
It's a replacement for a much older X11, which could no longer keep up with requirements of modern apps.
You never hear anything about compositors on Windows or Mac because there's only one available, you can't choose.
Actually, Windows does allow you to use an alternate “compositor”— a feature which is used quite frequently in the industrial/embedded space. Windows calls them “custom shells”. The default is Explorer, but it can be set to any executable.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise/customize/shell-launcher
It is being discussed because we're in the middle of the transition from X to Wayland. Before there wasn't much discussion. In a few years when it settles out there probably won't be much discussion.
Windows and Mac have never had a choice. There might have been significant changes to a window manager layer, but it would have been part of a larger version upgrade. Like between windows 3.1 and 95 or OS 9 to OS X. The visible changes would be closer to desktop environment like KDE and Gnome in Linux.
Thank you so much. One more question, why do we have so many issues with scaling, font rendering and all stuff and windows and macos just do it? Why aren't we doing similar?
I've seen enough blurry software on Windows to know this is not quite true 😅
what does "rootfull" mean?
XWayland normally runs x11 apps seamlessly (more or less) in Wayland
XWayland rootful spawns a window which is like a virtual monitor running a full x11 session inside it. You spawn apps inside of the window using the DISPLAY variable
Its confusing that we also use 'rootful' to refer to a process running as the root user
X11 is a mess. Wayland is a mess.
How, exactly, is Wayland a mess? It has a good legacy window compatibility layer and is solving a lot of problems X11 had. Seems perfectly alright to me.
Ehhh, any time I try a new distro I realize after a half dozen apps dont work, that its because its using wayland by default. X11 just works, wayland is a mess.