I hear so much about this, what is the difference??
X12? You just made that up, didn’t you?
X11 is X protocol version 11.
Wayland isn’t X protocol. Calling it X12 is a misnomer.
X12 actually exists. That said, it never went further than an extremely rough draft and was abandoned at some point, ultimately in favor of Wayland.
apologies I heard someone say x12 was Wayland damn 😭
I see X12 as a play on people who don’t like Wayland and want a better version of X instead. The interesting bit is that X10 isn’t compatible with X11, similar to it’s predecessors. And similarly, it’s not possible to drastically improve on a display server protocol without being incompatible with previous designs.
So in a way Wayland could have also been called X12. Would that have changed anything? Probably not.
Edit: Calling Wayland X12 isn’t a serious idea. It’s been decades since the last new version of X released, and with the name “X12” people would underestimate how different they are.
Except that Wayland isn’t X at all. They have a fundamentally different approach to making things appear on screen.
So Wayland = XinX12 = X is not X
Sounds catchy, xinx, say ksings.
Version 12 is xinxXII.
And then someone writes a compatibility wrapper for xfce and calls it XfxinxXII-X11.
Wayland is not X12. There is no X12. X is a server. With Wayland, the compositor is a server, window manager and compositor. Wayland itself is a set of protocols and a Wayland compositor is an implementation of these protocols where the protocols and portals essentially replace X and all of its functionality, while ensuring security, isolation, compartmentalisation and extensibility. X11 is an unmaintainable mess. Wayland is just a set of protocols. If an implementation of these protocols, i.e a compositor, becomes an unmaintainable mess, we can just use another preexisting compositor or make a new one. And for applications, you make a Wayland-native app, and it can work of GNOME, KDE, Wlroots, Smithay, etc. (as long as it doesn’t specifically depend on the compositor, like a wlroots wallpaper setter), which means that this app will potentially be able to work forever. And because compositors can only implement whatever they want, meaning that thungs are usually far more minimal and far more efficient than with X11.
Thank you for explaining what Wayland really is: a protocol. I see way too many people in forums going “Wayland constantly crashes” or “this doesn’t work with Wayland” but what they actually mean is that their compositor of choice crashes or lacks a feature. There are a few things that Wayland doesn’t support (like multiple-main-window-apps that want to put their children relative to each other (i.e. multi-window Gimp)), but that’s usually not what’s being discussed.
But please allow me to correct you on a few details:
- X is not a server. X.org is the single remaining “big” X server in use which replaced XFree86 a long long time ago.
Xis commonly available as a shortcut to start the main X server installation though. - X11 is not “an unmaintainable mess”. X11 isn’t as simple anymore as it used to be, but certainly not in an unmaintainable manner. But writing a new X server from scratch is about as much work as untangling the unmaintainable mess that is X.org
far more efficient than with X11
In theory. The issue is that, at this point in time, the vast majority of software that actually needs this efficiency (read: video games) run on XWayland, which adds a bit of overhead which ultimately causes them to run slightly slower on Wayland compositors compared to X.org. Maybe this will change at some point as devs patch their native games to check for a Wayland compositor by default and the big set of Wayland-support-patches makes its way into wine (and hopefully proton).
Yeah. I completely agree with the corrections. I was typing this in a hurry and as such, I made some silly mistakes. You’re right, I meant to say X.org which is pretty much the only X server in use today (there is also Xenocara on OpenBSD and there is probably some person or organization out there that still runs XFree86, but I digress). Xorg is an unmaintainable mess, as you said, and that wasz in fact, the point I was trying to make. Here’s to hoping Wayland gaming can become at least as good, if not better, in the near future!
- X is not a server. X.org is the single remaining “big” X server in use which replaced XFree86 a long long time ago.
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Wayland is the future and X11 is heading to the past.
The actual difference, from the point of view of someone not contributing code to either project?
Wayland is newer code, and provides better support for some hardware features of more recent origin like HiDPI. Because it’s newer, it can be a bit buggy/flaky sometimes, but it seems to be past the worst of that now and works well enough for many people. On modern hardware, it will probably provide a marginally better visual experience for someone who’s paying close attention to details like animation smoothness (stuff that I personally don’t care about).
X is older, more stable, and has certain core features (X forwarding, for instance) that Wayland prefers to leave for third-party software to implement. It’s also a child of an earlier era, and wasn’t designed with the expectation that it would be under attack 24/7 by malicious actors from around the world. The codebase, like those of many other older pieces of software, contains a certain amount of cruft and miscellaneous technical debt, and between that and the fact that X isn’t adding new! shiny! features, it’s harder to get coders to work on it. I’ve always found it to be solidly reliable provided that it’s being used in the sort of environment that was most common until recently (a single largish screen of <100dpi resolution with a constant refresh rate).
Personally I think that the xp era was the best. Then everything went downhill.
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Oh wait. You are talking about X.org.
Tldr with weather you her smoother animations, 1:1 touchpad gestures and an overall faster and more responsive desktop
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