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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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KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of "Wayland breaking everything" isn't really accurate.

"In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!"

Nate's Original Blog Post

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[–] CriticalMiss 42 points 10 months ago (30 children)

Every change will bring it's fair share of complainers, not much we can do about that. LILO to GRUB, SysV to systemd and now X11 to Wayland. No one is forcing your hand (unless you use a pre-packaged distro like Ubuntu/Fedora, in which case you go with whatever the distro provides), keep using X11 if you want stability, if you wanna dip your toes in bleeding-edge software and increase it's userbase to show hardware manufacturers that their drivers need to be updated (I'm looking at you, NVIDIA) then feel free to mess around.

Eventually the day will come when Wayland apps will simply not launch on X11 and you'll migrate too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

You are right in spirit.

It was not sysv to systemD, and it was forced (by making udev not work without it).

Other then nvidia, wayland is still missing some protocols (example: what virtual desktop you want your window to be on). But those protocols are (still) being worked on. And you will always be able to run x11 programs on wayland.

The advantages of wayland are a more direct path to hardware, and trowing away lots of code.

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