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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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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant (utcc.utoronto.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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In response to Wayland Breaks Your Bad Software

I say that the technical merits are irrelevant because I don't believe that they're a major factor any more in most people moving or not moving to Wayland.

With only a slight amount of generalization, none of these people will be moved by Wayland's technical merits. The energetic people who could be persuaded by technical merits to go through switching desktop environments or in some cases replacing hardware (or accepting limited features) have mostly moved to Wayland already. The people who remain on X are there either because they don't want to rebuild their desktop environment, they don't want to do without features and performance they currently have, or their Linux distribution doesn't think their desktop should switch to Wayland yet.

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[–] Asymptote@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have software dating back to 2003 that I need to support. X11 isn't going anywhere.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Xwayland has already been mentioned but this is an important point that not everybody may be familiar with. Xwayland is an Xserver ( actually a specialized version of Xorg itself ) that runs on top of Wayland instead of talking directly to hardware.

If you are running Xwayland, you can run X clients ( x11 software dating back to 2003 for example ) and they will appear on your desktop.

There can obviously be specific considerations around advanced software but moving to Wayland does not mean losing access to software written to target X. Qt and GTK support Wayland and will run native. Applications using other toolkits may still be running over X. As a normal user, you may not even know which applications are still using X and which are not.

This is for regular applications. Moving to Wayland requires a Desktop Environment or Window Manager that supports Wayland. So, GNOME and KDE users are fine but Cinnamon or WindowMaker users would need to switch.

[–] Asymptote@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

Neat. There's hope in the world yet :-)

[–] WuTang@lemmy.ninja 7 points 1 year ago

it's likely to be working thru Xwayland.