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Mr3Sepz ,

I am also a noob, but here is how I think it is:
What your Computer is doing is not what you see.
Until now we were using an oldschool way to display stuff called X11 aka. Xorg.

But this is very old and has 3 problems:

  • It is very old and hard to improve (code very complex, spagetthi, whatever)
  • Has security problems (I dont know what or how)
  • No modern features yet (HDR, and so on)

Because people want to use new display features to work and security, people built this display software code whatever new from scratch. And this is Wayland.

fxt_ryknow ,

My neighbors dog is Wayland. He's a good boy!

Samsy ,

Like you are 5: Wayland is the thing that brings the beep boop from the computer to a screen. It's the son/daughter from Xorg which is old af, and needs to die because no one wants to work on it trillions lines of code.

Lettuceeatlettuce ,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

Eli5: Wayland is a new way for Linux to make things appear on your screen, things like windows, graphics, and even your whole desktop.

The old way was called Xorg. It has been around for a very long time, and works pretty well, but the code is veryyyy messy and many developers wanted a new and easier way to make things appear on your screen, so they made Wayland.

(It's debatable how much easier Wayland actually is vs Xorg, but at this point most major distros are switching over to Wayland, so it's a moot point)

superfes ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5d41a5e1-976f-4c02-a398-92c2708fca65.gif

superfes ,

Wayland is the replacement for X11, it's getting pretty close to what I consider pretty good, I only have 2 more desires for Wayland, I'd like it to be able to remember where my windows were placed, and I'd like scaling to not suck.

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

Remembering window placements should be possible on KDE with Kwin rules. Maybe your window manager has something similar.

superfes ,

I'm using KWin, and you could for example start every Firefox window at the same specific position, but it would be better if it could just be where I put it last time, because even if I pop every window in the same place or not, the instant you have more than one window, it's useless. Remembering would be preferential.

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

Easy. Just create a rule not matching a particular window and set position to "Remember".

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

Why the downvote?

superfes ,

The exact same problem remains unsolved by your second recommendation, obvious trolling at this point.

Feel certain that if KWin could solve the problem, I wouldn't list it as a problem.

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

Just tried it myself on Plasma 6.0.4 on Wayland. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Works perfectly fine.

https://swg-empire.de/pictrs/image/8e4f3f25-0561-450e-b89c-123361083e33.png

superfes ,

For a single window.

Gakomi ,

In short a graphics interface with code that is not old af!

caseyweederman ,

I mean
https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/f8abc0cc-9cf3-499f-8f04-b1a72379d3e0.jpeg
Only relative to Xorg

Unyieldingly ,

Good things take time

trolololol ,

It's a baby compared to X10

Not to mention the GOAT: tty

neclimdul ,

That's technically true but not the whole picture since it was missing huge (some would say basic) features I wouldn't say it was really "released"

It was quite a while after that they called it and it's libraries feature of complete. With wm DE integration and multiple monitors coming a while after that, it's only been in the last maybe 5 years it was really usable? A solid option for a lot of people for maybe half that?

That makes it pretty dang new.

caseyweederman ,

Well. Is Xorg feature-complete?

neclimdul ,

It was the baseline so... Yes?

The feature completion was defined as running most normal applications and by the people working on Wayland not me some random guy on the Internet.

Because no one is going to use Wayland, if they can't.... use it

Omgboom ,

Wayland Jennings, a great country singer

baseless_discourse , (edited )

Basically, you should try it, if it works, keep using it; if it doesn't, switch to xorg to see if that fixes your problem.

Wayland is newer, have better support for multi-monitor, and application cannot see what you are typing in other app (so they cannot log your key and send your password to someone else).

Konstant ,

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    baseless_discourse , (edited )

    It is the same on Windows, people can put a ahk script in your autostart, logs your password and send it to anyone on the internet, all without even invoking UAC.

    So yeah, wayland is kind of important...

    aledo ,

    Is there a way to designate specific programs to be able to still have global access to your input? For instance specifically for AHK-type activities.

    baseless_discourse ,

    Yes, on wayland you will need to run a particular program as root to be able to read all keyboard input. See xremap or mouseless (unmaintained).

    Since you already give the program plenty of trust to let it read all your inputs, I think running it as root is not outrages.

    That being said, in an ideal scenario, we would be able to set fine-grained permissions like, allow to read keyboard input but deny communication with other app, networks, and storage etc. But I don't know any OS that can do this.

    A more straightforward way to remap key is to get a keyboard with QMK firmware, that doesn't cover all the use case of ahk, xremap, or mouseless, but that don't require you to trust another program to run as root.

    SomethingBurger ,
    @SomethingBurger@jlai.lu avatar

    have better support for multi-monitor

    In my experience, it's way worse than Xorg. With Wayland, I cannot turn off my laptop screen but keep the external display, and having both monitors on at once can cause crashes when GPU acceleration is needed (videos or games). Somehow this is nVidia's fault, yet it works on Xorg with the same hardware.

    ByteWelder ,
    @ByteWelder@lemmy.ml avatar

    If a driver doesn't behave properly, the things that are built on top of it won't work properly either. When that misbehaving driver is not open source, you're at the mercy of the vendor..
    It's common knowledge for over a decade that nVidia drivers are problematic with Linux - especially on laptops. Bad drivers are entirely nVidia's fault.

    I've been running Wayland with Intel graphics on my laptop and my desktop runs a Radeon. I've had 0 Wayland issues in the past years.

    baseless_discourse ,

    I use a laptop to run home console, and its display can turn off just fine.

    I was intentionally vague in my response, since I don't want to confuse the reader. Specifically, the improvement I was referring to is when you run two monitor with different refresh rate or different scaling factor.

    refalo ,

    Just don't ask what hyprland is.

    Tikiporch ,

    Famous country western singer Wayland Jenkins.

    Titou ,
    @Titou@sh.itjust.works avatar

    it's Xorg's opponent. The challenger.

    AA5B ,

    Does it have more ships, more planetary systems under its thrall?

    sebinspace ,

    now you’re speaking my language

    Rustmilian , (edited )
    @Rustmilian@lemmy.world avatar

    Wayland is a modular communication protocol that specifies how a compositor interacts with its clients, as well as a replacement for X11.
    Wayland does not aim to provide a commonly used compositor implementation that could be used by everyone.

    This modular approach allows for different desktop environments to have their own Wayland compositor implementations that reliability produce the same or virtually the same output based on the communication specifications without the increased challenges of integrating it into existing Desktop Environments or Window Managers as it allows for more flexibility in implementation. As an analogy, it's like if several people were making the same type of sandwich in different ways, as long as the "client" (the application) gets the sandwich they asked for, the specific process doesn't matter.

    In contrast, Xorg is a single, monolithic X11 implementation. Due to Xorg's dated, non-modular design, maintaining and extending it's functionality is extremely difficult. Infact, it's lack HDR support to this day is due to its inflexible architecture.

    Wayland compositors combine the functionality of a display server, window manager, and compositor into a single component. This simplified architecture is one of the main design goals of Wayland compared to Xorg/X11 where the display server, compositor & window manager are separate components. This approach ultimately streamlines the rendering pipeline where applications render locally and communicate directly with the compositor, cutting out the X server entirely. Wayland's client-side rendering is more modern and cleaner than Xorg's approach.

    devfuuu ,

    So you wanna go from home to school. The whole distance/trip can be done on a bus or your moms car. That's a means of transportation. But, now people are creating a train and soon you will have another means of transportation that you can go to school with, by train.

    That's it, Wayland is another means of transportation (newer) than the older means of transportation that existed for a long time, x11 or xorg.

    The route is how can applications show stuff on a screen, what transport should they use.

    Gormadt OP ,
    @Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    Okay I think I'm following so far

    And the whole "show stuff on screen" thing

    I'm guessing it's kinda like: you've got a couple people sitting there wanting to play with Legos and only so much room to play. They don't have direct access to the play area because of security reasons so they have to ask someone to place the Legos for them. Wayland, X11, and Xorg are all different people they can talk to to place the Legos in a way where no one is fighting for space.

    So basically it's a new way for programs to negotiate who has what part of the screen?

    I'm guessing Wayland is either more feature rich or lighter on resources and that's why it's a big deal?

    redcalcium ,

    It's an entirely different design than X11. It gains features not possible to implement on X11, while losing many features exists in X11. People that like those new features love Wayland, while people that use those missing features hate it.

    Gormadt OP ,
    @Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    What kinds of features does it gain and lose?

    redcalcium ,

    The most obvious, user-visible loss of features are applications no longer able to grab/mess with contents of another application's window. Screen sharing and remote desktop was broken for a long time in wayland until it's fixed via pipewire recently. Under X11, rendering is free-for-all, where any app is free to do whatever it wants to other app's window. Heck, you can even tell mpv to play video on a cell in librecalc if you feel like it. Such shenanigans is now impossible in wayland because it's a big security risk (though I'm not sure if it's actually exploited in the wild).

    The most hyped feature of wayland is better support for high resolution "retina" display. Also, you can use multiple monitors with different dpi/scaling in wayland. IIRC it's not possible on X11, though you can use xrandr to force the scaling on each monitor, though it'll result in blurry texts because the scaling is not done natively.

    devfuuu , (edited )

    Yeah, it's a new way that programs use to draw their stuff on the screens.

    In the middle usually are other stuff that abstract away that part from normal application development, so in general, most applications don't need to care with the low level thing that is being used to draw their stuff, but there is always somethings that some apps will do to bypass or expect to work in a certain way, so sometimes changes and time are need to adjust those applications to play well with the new way of drawing.

    The core idea of why Wayland matters is that it is designed to take advantage of the hardware features and how hardware is designed in this century. On xorg, since it was designed around the architecture and expectations of what people thought things should work in the 70s, it was becoming really hard to add features related to how newer hardware worked. Things like multiple gpus, prime architectures, multiple surfaces/screens with multiple aspect ratios and dpis, varying refresh rates, taking advantage of hardware acceleration for graphics drawing, etc, were all really hard things to do because the code had multiple concepts not applicable to the modern age. So, essentially developers were already bypassing 99% of the internals of xorg architecture and hacking things in a very hard way. They basically decided/experimented with stripping apart all the things they didn't need and didn't matter and reduced it to the most basic and core thing that mattered: "how to push these pixels to that surface".

    It ended up being a successful experiment, in that it showed it was possible to do.

    Now, in the current world, there are solutions that need to be implemented to bring some features up to speed since the wayland thing is so core and barebones. And this is a good thing. It allows developers and applications to think really hard about what they need to do and how they should do and how things should work across all toolkits and desktop environments. Obviously this takes time to make decisions and ensure everyone is onboard, experiment and reiterate on it until good solutions are found.

    This last point is what makes end users frustrated when trying wayland because some things are lacking or not ready yet. For the general use, users without really specific needs, they can already use wayland now, but for others they can't because of their particular needs or specific hardware situation.

    If xorg is working for you, then there's no need to worry. If it's invisible to you then most likely you shouldn't care, because the desktop environments are changing their sessions to use wayland by default and most users will not perceive any difference. If users see problems and then notice that it's related to using wayland they can choose explicitly to use the xorg version since it will still work for a while.

    Hope I didn't make it too complicated now.

    sxan ,
    @sxan@midwest.social avatar

    The part about negotiation is a bit off-track.

    On one end, in the kernel, there's a big array of pixels that is a picture that gets drawn on your monitor (or monitors). On the other end are a bunch of programs that want to draw stuff, like pictures of your friends and web pages. In between is software that decides how the stuff the softwares want to draw get put into the pixel array. This is Wayland; it was written to replace Xorg, which is what did that job for decades prior to Wayland.

    If you understand the concepts of Xorg and window managers, Wayland + a compositor = Xorg + a window manager. Wayland abdicated a lot of work to the compositors, making it simpler and easier to maintain (and compositors more complex and harder). But together, they all do basically the same job. If one of the compositors implemented a network protocol, then you could declare equivalency.

    Rustmilian , (edited )
    @Rustmilian@lemmy.world avatar

    Display Server + Compositor + Window Manager = Wayland Compositor = Implementation of Wayland Protocol

    Display Server = Xorg = X11 Implementation

    Xorg + Separate Compositor + Separate Window Manger = the X11 equivalent of a Wayland Compositor

    boredsquirrel ,

    It is the Way

    waigl ,

    I have been sort of following Wayland's development for over 10 years now. I have been using Wayland for over 2 years now. I have been reading and watching various lengthy arguments online for and against it. I still don't feel like I actually know it even is, not beyond some handwavey superficialities. Definitely not to the extent and depth I could understand what X11 was and how to actually work with it, troubleshoot it when necessary and achieve something slightly unusual with it. I feel like, these days, you are either getting superficial marketing materials, ELI5 approaches that seem to be suited at best to pacify a nosy child without giving them anything to actually work with, or reference manuals full of unexplained jargon for people who already know how it works and just need to look up some details now and then...

    Maybe I'm getting old. I used to like Linux because I could actually understand what was going on…

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