<insert “and this point I’m too afraid to ask” meme>
Can anyone explain how Wayland and X(?) relate to Linux?
Like what’s the windows equivalent?
I’ve used Ubuntu desktop a few times, I keep liveUSB versions of mint, Suse, and Ubuntu on my ventoy, but I just don’t understand what the deal is with the constant discussion of Wayland and X…
Windows includes both display hardware handling functionality and a GUI framework to run on top of it. All of that is part of the OS that Microsoft provides
A Linux system is assembled from several parts that aren't all that related to each other beyond the API interfaces exposed/used
The Linux kernel brings a lot of core OS functionality, including display hardware handling, and a framework to expand that with hardware-specific drivers
The kernel does not bring a GUI framework. That has to come separately. X and Wayland are both approaches to filling that gap on Linux systems
X is basically how GUIs have worked on most Linux/Unix systems for the last few decades. There's some weird cruft from the assumptions used when the X framework was designed
Wayland is trying to get rid of the cruft and align better to how computers are used today. But it has to fight against X's inertia, and it's been a long road to Wayland being "daily driver" usable
> ...it's been a long road to Wayland being "daily driver" usable
Fifteen years and counting! If my math is right, it's older now than XFree86 was when Xorg was forked from it, and ~six months younger than XFree86 was when xorg got XRandR and input hotplugging support.
On a similar vein, CMD and PowerShell are equivalent to the Terminal as the command line interface shell.
>I just don’t understand what the deal is with the constant discussion of Wayland and X…
Imagine two groups of people squabbling whether it's better to use Stacking Window Manager (used from Windows 2 through XP) or Desktop Window Manager (used from Windows Vista onwards).
Wayland & X provide the graphics interface. Windows no longer has any such separation, but in the old days Windows ran on top of DOS, Linux still splits the GUI & CLI up.
In practice Linux is even more granular, with multiple options at many more layers of the stack.
Can anyone explain how Wayland and X(?) relate to Linux?
Like what’s the windows equivalent?
I’ve used Ubuntu desktop a few times, I keep liveUSB versions of mint, Suse, and Ubuntu on my ventoy, but I just don’t understand what the deal is with the constant discussion of Wayland and X…