Obviously this is somewhat subjective, but I’ve had a lot of problems in my previous attempts to switch to Linux, so I’d like to create a list of distros to try out, and see what works for me. I’m mostly expecting to be doing basic office work and light gaming via Steam.
Basically, whenever an app has a GUI it wants to display, it communicates that to ‘the system’ with all the necessary details. After which ‘the system’ does the rendering and whatnot. Wayland is a protocol that defines a set of rules on how this interaction should take place. Hence, technically, it is only (the defining) part of the modern solution.
Very. Basically, either it or its ‘predecessor’[1] X11 is involved whenever you want to display/render anything[2] on desktop Linux. As X11 has been abandoned in favor of Wayland, some modern features like HDR or VRR are only found on the latter. On the other hand, I believe Wayland was never meant to offer full feature-parity with X11. Hence, some unsupported edge cases may continue to exist indefinitely. Thankfully, it has come a long way. What remains are some concerns related to accessibility AND the adjustment[3] of the surrounding ecosystem.
The term is used loosely here, because there’s a very big difference between the two. ↩︎
Which, to be clear, happens literally all the time. Unless your display needs don’t go beyond what was already available on MS-DOS*. ↩︎
Like, how only very recently Electron got to become proper Wayland-native. Note that Xwayland is included with Wayland as a compatibility layer whenever something is not Wayland-native yet. ↩︎
Thank you for the intro, that helped. Sounds like Mint not having it is relevant
Glad to hear it was helpful.
Yup. FWIW, there’s also the security argument; I.e. X11 makes keylogging trivial, while Wayland provides protection against it by default. Having said that, there is experimental support for Wayland in Linux Mint. But, ideally, it needs more time to cook.