• Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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    10 months ago

    This is a bit different to DEs. X11 and Wayland are display server protocols. For some time all DEs used X11, but it wasn’t perfect and had some issues, so some folks came up with Wayland to replace it. I don’t know a lot about the differences but one example I have is that you can’t have two monitors with different resolution scaling on X11. Wayland solves that issue.

    X11 has been around for a long time, though, and does a lot of stuff, probably more stuff than a display server should. and so a lot of Linux programs have come to rely on those things. This means that the change to Wayland is not straight forward, it meant rewriting a whole bunch of X11 functionality that Wayland would never add.

    This will probably be a good thing in the long run, but as of now a lot of people are still not ready to change. And to mirror your sentiment, nor should they have to.

    Also: I probably don’t know as much about this topic as some others, so correct me at will.

    • andrew_bidlaw
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      10 months ago

      I learnt some things reading you, thank you. As a newbie to Linux I’m not the one to argue anything. But I had an urge to shitpost, and my last sentence comes from an abbreviature of XFCE and references both Wayland and X11. I’m an artist more than I’m a thinker.