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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Differences between Wayland and X11 (lemmy.ml)

submitted 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I stumbled upon this post regarding an earlier rant about wayland, but now it seems fine, according to the author.

After using Linux for nearly 5 years, using both depending on distros defaults, I have to admit that I never got the core/main/game changing differences between wayland and x11.

To be said, that I also dont do fancy linux things other than basic sysadmin stuff and from time to time repair the mess my curiosity left behind.

Could somebody explain the differences between those two and afterwards maybe also say some words about what this has to do with the difference between window managers and desktop environments?

I am also happy about links to good blog posts or stuff, that target this very questions (as long as the questions make sence of course). Thanks beforehand :)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks for the interesting write up! Why does Nvidia have to "adopt" Wayland? Is it not just fundamentally drawing some textures into some rectangles?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Unfortunately not. There’s been a number of things on Nvdia’s side that slowed down Wayland adoption.

They didn’t always support Xwayland hardware acceleration.

Nvidia pushed for a technology called EGLStreams while everyone else agreed on GBM. So the desktop stack had to support both. Nvidia eventually relented and started supporting GBM.

Nvidia didn’t support VRR or night light for a while.

Nvidia didn’t support necessary stuff for Gamescope to function properly.

And overall Nvidia on Wayland was just buggy. I remember that many games failed to launch or had weird performance issues. But those issues just went away when I got an AMD card.

But things are in a much better state today. Though I did recently test a 20 series card on Fedora 41 and it was a terrible experience on the proprietary drivers. But when speaking with orhers, they didn’t share my issues.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Why does Nvidia need to support night light? Can't someone from Wayland just write a simple shader in any shader language that does colour adjustments and apply it to the desktop?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago

The Nvidia driver didn’t support some protocol that AMD/Intel did that was used by desktops for the night light.

Yes, they could have made the night light work. But why would they when Nvidia said the feature was coming soon? Well it turned out that soon was taking a very long time and eventually KDE actually did create a special night light implementation just for Nvidia. The problem was that it was a hack that had extra overhead. And in the end the hack didn’t get shipped because Nvidia finally starting supporting the protocol.