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ELI5 the whole Wayland vs X11 going on.
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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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X11 is like a big dilapidated house. It doesn't work very well anymore and is difficult to maintain.
Wayland is new modern house. Smaller and more efficient, but missing some amenities that the old house had that some people still want, like a wood burning stove.
Follow-up question, Wayland not adopting those "amenities" is just a feature that is missing right now or it's impossible to adopt them in Wayland?
Most features missing right now (not all) are against the Wayland philosophy, this doesn't mean that you won't get anything but that it needs a "modern era replacement". Though applications will need to support the replacement. This is usually for good reasons.
The prime example is screen recording. Allowing any program to read and write the entire screen is objectively wrong, no matter what the big time X11 fans say. But there is a replacement: pipewire. Pipewire is extremely advanced and featureful, and it's more secure because it allows the system and the user to audit who is reading the screen and what part. The problem is that programs need to support pipewire for screen recording, but the main culprits are niche screen recorders (OBS is the best anyway, and it supports it) and proprietary video call software like discord (zoom supports it), which is silly because for electron apps it's literally a matter of using a version less than 3 years old an adding a flag.
So we can achieve all the missing features by a little twisting, sweet.
Like doorknobs or windows. Wayland wasn't just trimmed down, it was trimmed down to the point of being non-functional and it has taken ages to slowly patch that back up.
walks onto building site
"Where are all the doorknobs?!"
"Trimmed down" is probably not the best way to put it, as it's not a limited version of X but an entirely separate protocol, so it's growing from zero rather than shrinking from where X was