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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Can someone ELI5 why some apps need to support X11/wayland? (lemmy.eco.br)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Isn't this supposed to be a job for the window manager?

For example, my virtualbox install has some mouse pointer bugs on wayland, and I can't run waydroid on X. These things are weird to me. Shouldn't window managers abstract all that for the software we run?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Typically the abstraction to draw elemnts inside a app window is in the application framework, like GTK, Qt, Electron (chromium), etc.

This is also why apps built with the same framework typically have the same problem on wayland (looking at you, electron).

The abstractions you are thinking of is not in the window manager, which only controls things outside of the main app window, like tiling, border, window top bar, etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Yes, part of my confusion was simply mixing up the job of the app frameworks/gui toolkits for the wm. It was weird to me that some apps like firefox had to provide wayland support by themselves and couldn't simply rely on abstraction layers from whathever they're coded in. However, I looked for some info, and found out that firefox renders some widgets on its own, and now it makes sense that they need to provide wayland support.