I cannot wait until this lands in most distros. So much of the Wayland noise will go away.
X11 is a mess. Wayland is a mess.
How, exactly, is Wayland a mess? It has a good legacy window compatibility layer and is solving a lot of problems X11 had. Seems perfectly alright to me.
Ehhh, any time I try a new distro I realize after a half dozen apps dont work, that its because its using wayland by default. X11 just works, wayland is a mess.
Can someone please eli5? Why do I never hear anything about the window manager in windows and macos? Why is all the fuss on our side on Linux? I’m genuinely asking.
A compositor is a program responsible for displaying program windows and things like the desktop on your PC. On Linux, the compositor is just a program that starts when the system starts. There are multiple desktop environments available, like Plasma or Gnome, each comes with their own compositor, you can choose which you want to use.
Wayland is a protocol that the programs use to communicate with the compositor. Everyone decided to use Wayland, because if each compositor had their own protocol it would be silly, eg some programs would work only on Plasma or Gnome.
It’s a replacement for a much older X11, which could no longer keep up with requirements of modern apps.
You never hear anything about compositors on Windows or Mac because there’s only one available, you can’t choose.
Actually, Windows does allow you to use an alternate “compositor”— a feature which is used quite frequently in the industrial/embedded space. Windows calls them “custom shells”. The default is Explorer, but it can be set to any executable.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise/customize/shell-launcher
