The X Window System (known as X11 - 11th version) is currently the predominant way for Linux users to use a graphical interface, specifically a windowed interface.
It is old and was designed for a purpose that doesn't match current usage nor technology. For this reason, a number of projects have risen to replace X11.
'Wayland' is the best supported of these projects, whilst 'Mir' is similar but has much less support. Mir was started specifically for Ubuntu, and has caused significant controversy in the community.
Until these new projects are completed, and in order to support legacy software written for X, bridges that allow X11 compatible software to run on Wayland or Mir have been created. These are called XWayland and XMir respectively.
== Current Story ==
The open source Intel drivers support X11, and increasingly will support Wayland (not sure on current state of this).
Canonical wrote a patchset that adds support for Mir to the Intel drivers, and requested that this be included in the main Intel project.
Intel has, for seemingly political reasons, denied that request. Canonical will thus have to maintain the patches themselves (it is common for many distributions to maintain patchsets in this way). If anyone else wanted to use Mir, and use Canonical's XMir bridge, they would need to source it from Canonical directly rather than from the main Intel repository.
It seems that Intel doesn't want to support multiple new windowing projects, and has backed Wayland over Mir (as have many others in the community).
Does anyone know if Intel could just expose an API that is entirely agnostic of the display server, so Wayland, Mir, XMir, or some random other project could all use the same interface and get full functionality?
The X Window System (known as X11 - 11th version) is currently the predominant way for Linux users to use a graphical interface, specifically a windowed interface.
It is old and was designed for a purpose that doesn't match current usage nor technology. For this reason, a number of projects have risen to replace X11.
'Wayland' is the best supported of these projects, whilst 'Mir' is similar but has much less support. Mir was started specifically for Ubuntu, and has caused significant controversy in the community.
Until these new projects are completed, and in order to support legacy software written for X, bridges that allow X11 compatible software to run on Wayland or Mir have been created. These are called XWayland and XMir respectively.
== Current Story ==
The open source Intel drivers support X11, and increasingly will support Wayland (not sure on current state of this).
Canonical wrote a patchset that adds support for Mir to the Intel drivers, and requested that this be included in the main Intel project.
Intel has, for seemingly political reasons, denied that request. Canonical will thus have to maintain the patches themselves (it is common for many distributions to maintain patchsets in this way). If anyone else wanted to use Mir, and use Canonical's XMir bridge, they would need to source it from Canonical directly rather than from the main Intel repository.
It seems that Intel doesn't want to support multiple new windowing projects, and has backed Wayland over Mir (as have many others in the community).