this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Xorg? Wayland? Seems like I lack context to understand that competition.
My distro came wirh Cinnamon, and it died two times on my setup after updates - black screen after login - before I installed Xfce instead and still use it daily. I love that unlike Windows you can just jump ships and unsubscribe from what you dislike. This meme draws that freedom as something bad. It's not healthy to the community...
... but if there would be a DE war, Xpect frequent combat engagements, as the way to your land and ten of your HQs are marked with red Xs on my map.
This is a bit different to DEs. X11 and Wayland are display server protocols. For some time all DEs used X11, but it wasn't perfect and had some issues, so some folks came up with Wayland to replace it. I don't know a lot about the differences but one example I have is that you can't have two monitors with different resolution scaling on X11. Wayland solves that issue.
X11 has been around for a long time, though, and does a lot of stuff, probably more stuff than a display server should. and so a lot of Linux programs have come to rely on those things. This means that the change to Wayland is not straight forward, it meant rewriting a whole bunch of X11 functionality that Wayland would never add.
This will probably be a good thing in the long run, but as of now a lot of people are still not ready to change. And to mirror your sentiment, nor should they have to.
Also: I probably don't know as much about this topic as some others, so correct me at will.
I learnt some things reading you, thank you. As a newbie to Linux I'm not the one to argue anything. But I had an urge to shitpost, and my last sentence comes from an abbreviature of XFCE and references both Wayland and X11. I'm an artist more than I'm a thinker.
Xorg and Wayland are two protocols every Desktop Environment use and is, from my limited knowledge on it, the thing that tells the DE how to behave and display windows on your screen. Since 1984, the Linux world uses Xorg (now at the 11 edition: X11) but now, there is a massive transition towards a protocol more secure and focused around privacy called Wayland because first, it's objectively better, and because X11 will soon be deprecated/abandoned. But due to its way of handling things (like for example, windows can't see each other: they think they're alone on the PC, preventing some programs from spying on each others but also preventing them to communicate with each other, like to share screen or screenshot. We have portals to solve that now though, so no worries), Wayland struggle to convince everybody and therefore is heavily criticized, mostly because it's sort of being forced due to the Xorg team letting the project die to develop Wayland, the successor, waiting for every distros and their DE to adopt it.
But despite not directly mentioning those protocols, you're right by saying "you can just jump ships and unsubscribe from what you dislike" because honestly, nobody's preventing people from continuing to use Xorg and groups from continuing the development of DE based on Xorg or simply continuing the Xorg project, but if they want to progress and evolve with the rest of the world, they will have to switch to Wayland eventually.