Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdfghswe | Hacker News Reader

ELI5 please?

X is the tech we have used since the dawn of time. It was released in 1984 and so the architecture is not suited for the way modern desktops operate.

Wayland is a modern replacement, but it is not a drop-in. That is because it has a completely different architecture and approach.

I cannot ELI5 the differences between the two, because they are somewhat vast.

If you are on a platform that supports Wayland, it is undoubtedly a smoother, prettier and overall better experience. This falls apart due to the lack of direct support from certain apps, desktop environments, etc. The migration has taken some time - but alas this is an open source effort in a massive/fragmented environment so it is obviously a very hard challenge. Like herding 100,000 cats.

Unfortunately not everything will just work. A stopgap is something called xwayland which allows x apps to communicate with wayland - although it is not perfect.

Firefox will work with Wayland. It will work with X. It will work with XWayland. The default though is X or XWayland. You normally need to explicitly tell Firefox to boot up using Wayland. Firefox is now considering making it enabled by default, which would be great for those of us who run on Wayland all the time. It would of course still work on X.

>> X is the tech we have used since the dawn of time. It was released in 1984 and so the architecture is not suited for the way modern desktops operate.

X is a mature architecture which Just Works Fine. I don't know why it's considered "not suited for the way modern desktops operate", because as an X(org) user, all my desktops operate Just Fine whereas whenever I try Wayland my desktops do not operate Just Fine.

>> Wayland is a modern replacement, but it is not a drop-in. That is because it has a completely different architecture and approach.

Wayland is a newcomer and alternative to X(org) - the authors of Wayland want it to take over from X(org) and for X(org) to die off. I hope that X(org) stays.

I still don't understand the hate for X/Xorg [0]. It must be a generational thing. Maybe I'm just being a grumpy greybeard? Who knows. But I do know that whenever I try, say, KDE Plasma (Wayland) I get problems, for example, playing games with WINE, and other annoying glitches and hitches which I don't get using MATE/Xorg.

And no, I don't care if Gnome works great with Wayland - I have a visceral contempt for the modern iteration of the Gnome desktop (and had nasty experiences with the Gtk toolkit way back when which put me off developing with it forever.)

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxmemes/comments/175chou/linux_b...

The converse is that many people including me have experienced issues with X11. I've been using X11 on BSD/Linux for 25 years and it's been a poor experience involving researching how to get a specific GPU to work correctly every time I installed BSD/Linux. This was especially frustrating when Windows/MacOS always just worked fine out of the box on the same hardware. When Debian switched to Wayland a few years back it was literally the first time in over 20 years that I had a working Linux desktop out of the box that didn't have basic issues like screen tearing. I appreciate the legacy X11 has left us but Wayland literally just works with no trouble across several machines I own.

The team behind Wayland (freedesktop.org) are also the developers for xorg, nobody wants to work on xorg anymore due to architectural and codebase issues. Most of the commits to Xorg recently have been for XWayland, not Xorg. Xorg is essentially in maintaince mode.

Whilst most of the newer things implemented Wayland could theoretically be implemented within the X architecture nobody wants to do it both due to the architecture of X and the age of the Xorg codebase.

X will presumably be around for another 50 years but it will not receive the development needed for modern tech.

Nearly all of the hate I hear for X/Xorg is from Xorg developers (modulo people complaining about video tearing). As far as I can tell they will not be contributing to Xorg anymore, so it's going to gradually fade away.

X doesn't work as well as it used to. Before all the eyecandy became routine it was normal to use it remotely over a LAN. It performed well at that job in the era of OpenLook and Motif over 10Mbit Ethernet. Nowadays X is sluggish over an SSH tunnel to a local client server, even with classic Athena apps. Something has gone astray with xorg and it's giving X in general a bad rap.

Yes you’re being a grumpy graybeard. Does X work? Yes. But so does my 32-bit Pentium III.

Wasn’t trying to shit on it I’m just telling it as it is.

I also dislike Gnome. I run KDE on Wayland on a 5K display and everything is fast, low latency and gorgeous.

That was amazing, thank you.

There's 2 ways to get a window to show up on a Linux desktop, the old way is called X11 and the new way called Wayland. These protocols handle putting stuff on the screen as well as input from your mouse and keyboard (and touch screen if you're one of the 2 people that have one).

Mozilla has been working toward making Firefox work with wayland for a while, seems they've finally gotten in to a shipable state.

To be fair it's probably been fine for years -- what they've proposed is how it's been done in many distros already. They're more or less upstreaming the changes many distros have already done when they switched to Wayland by default over the last couple of years.

You're not wrong. I've been using the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND envvar for a while and not noticed any difference.

When I said "shipable state" I was thinking "shipped, enabled by default". Probably should've just said that instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com