I am also a noob, but here is how I think it is: What your Computer is doing is not what you see. Until now we were using an oldschool way to display stuff called X11 aka. Xorg.
But this is very old and has 3 problems:
It is very old and hard to improve (code very complex, spagetthi, whatever)
Has security problems (I dont know what or how)
No modern features yet (HDR, and so on)
Because people want to use new display features to work and security, people built this display software code whatever new from scratch. And this is Wayland.
It draws on the screen what programs and the desktop environment tell it to – including opacity, tiling, clicks, drags, updates, etc. Everything you visually perceive on the monitor is the product of the compositor.
Okay but why is it seemingly always associated with gaming? Anytime someone mentions Linux gaming, I often hear people asking them if they’re using Wayland.
I’ll step aside for a longer answer on this one. But, I can say that for my usecase (which is mainly gaming on my home PC on an all AMD build with KDE on Arch) it is noticeably and measurably faster than X11. We’re talking 2-15 (the median is around 4 or 5) FPS depending on the game on 144hz screens.
That’s technically true but not the whole picture since it was missing huge (some would say basic) features I wouldn’t say it was really “released”
It was quite a while after that they called it and it’s libraries feature of complete. With wm DE integration and multiple monitors coming a while after that, it’s only been in the last maybe 5 years it was really usable? A solid option for a lot of people for maybe half that?
Like you are 5: Wayland is the thing that brings the beep boop from the computer to a screen. It’s the son/daughter from Xorg which is old af, and needs to die because no one wants to work on it trillions lines of code.
Like you are 5: Wayland is the thing that brings the beep boop from the computer to a screen. It’s the son/daughter from Xorg which is old af, and needs to die because no one wants to work on it trillions lines of code.
In the past we only had text terminals without a graphical interface ~1990 (sh / bash / tty). so the display server (Xorg / formaly known as X11) was born. it’s a piece of software that allows programs to not only print text to screen but to draw complex geometrical shapes. This allowed for gui programs that use frameworks like qt or gtk or motif… to draw buttons and shit using Xorg.
For having mutliple “windows” / “programs” running they invented a window manager, that drew a border around the windows with some min / max /close buttons and the modern gui was good to go. btw. the next step are desktop environments like kde or gnome but that would be too much for this post.
Back to display server (Xorg) and window manager (kwin, mutter, metacity, dwm, awesome, i3…): the design of xorg is super old and has many shortcomings like hdr, variable refreshrate or security: every window can read the contents of or produce input for other windows which is a nightmare for todays security standards.
So wayland was invented to use state of the art concepts and design. Here comes the big problem: State of the art concepts required wayland to not be a display manager like Xorg. wayland is more like a protocol that defines how to draw windows, resize and close them or how they are allowed to talk to each other. Since wayland is only a protocol+ the window manager now needs to do the heavy lifting of coordinating this protocol, drawing and stuff like that, which in turn results in way less window managers that support wayland because they are complex as hell.
Since modern software needs to support a heck of a lot of different ways for applications to interact with each other rewriting these functionality for wayland needs time. thats the reason desktop sharing/recording or muting your mic with a keyboard shortcut when the webex window was not in focus wasn’t possible at first. new solutiones needed to be developed for that (pipewire for example). Many programs would run in an xorg window that was implemented as a wayland window (xwayland) which made transitioning to wayland much easier but introduced new problems.
At the moment we are in a transitional phase. many programs already work without problems, but many software still require features wayland doesn’t have and might never implement. Everyone needing that software is hating on wayland. everyone needing variable refreshrate, fractional scaling or security prefers to use wayland. And the fighting begins.
Disclaimer: There might be errors, simplifications or misunderstandings on my side but thats the way i understood if. Feel free to correct any mistakes on my part.
Basically, you should try it, if it works, keep using it; if it doesn’t, switch to xorg to see if that fixes your problem.
Wayland is newer, have better support for multi-monitor, and application cannot see what you are typing in other app (so they cannot log your key and send your password to someone else).
In my experience, it’s way worse than Xorg. With Wayland, I cannot turn off my laptop screen but keep the external display, and having both monitors on at once can cause crashes when GPU acceleration is needed (videos or games). Somehow this is nVidia’s fault, yet it works on Xorg with the same hardware.
I use a laptop to run home console, and its display can turn off just fine.
I was intentionally vague in my response, since I don’t want to confuse the reader. Specifically, the improvement I was referring to is when you run two monitor with different refresh rate or different scaling factor.
If a driver doesn’t behave properly, the things that are built on top of it won’t work properly either. When that misbehaving driver is not open source, you’re at the mercy of the vendor… It’s common knowledge for over a decade that nVidia drivers are problematic with Linux - especially on laptops. Bad drivers are entirely nVidia’s fault.
I’ve been running Wayland with Intel graphics on my laptop and my desktop runs a Radeon. I’ve had 0 Wayland issues in the past years.
It is the same on Windows, people can put a ahk script in your autostart, logs your password and send it to anyone on the internet, all without even invoking UAC.
Yes, on wayland you will need to run a particular program as root to be able to read all keyboard input. See xremap or mouseless (unmaintained).
Since you already give the program plenty of trust to let it read all your inputs, I think running it as root is not outrages.
That being said, in an ideal scenario, we would be able to set fine-grained permissions like, allow to read keyboard input but deny communication with other app, networks, and storage etc. But I don’t know any OS that can do this.
A more straightforward way to remap key is to get a keyboard with QMK firmware, that doesn’t cover all the use case of ahk, xremap, or mouseless, but that don’t require you to trust another program to run as root.
Add comment