[Linux.conf.au 2013] - The real story behind Wayland and X
HackersOnBoard2 HN recommenders · 2016–2023
35K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2013-03-27
A linux.conf.au 2013 talk by a Wayland developer who previously worked on X, telling the history of X and why Wayland was created. It covers X's hardware abstraction and architecture and why they became problematic for modern graphics.
Whenever Wayland versus X comes up, HN points to this talk as the authoritative explanation from an X maintainer of why X was replaced.
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6 comments from Hacker News
> However it's the lack of network transparency which stops me from using Wayland in the foreseeable future. X is not network transparent, and hasn't been for a long time. [VIDEO]
One of the arguments made by the Wayland spec folks (many of whom were involved in Xorg development for many years) is that the Xorg spec is also a major cause of problems with modern Linux graphics[1]. [1]: [VIDEO]
I tried to give a hint about the basic reason of trying to get out from under the weight of a huge code base that had become old and crufty while the very architecture it was designed around was becoming moot since things were shifting to client side rendering already. Couldn't find a good article on short notice, but there's a decent video from back in 2013 about it. [VIDEO]
Here you are: [VIDEO] It’s a great presentation by one of the guys behind wayland, who worked on X a lot before. Basically, X has a fundamentally misaligned abstraction of the underlying hardware - which is expected based on its age. When used with a compositor, it is basically a middle-man with no function whatsoever. So Wayland decided to cut out the middle man and pass events directly between client and compositor. But please watch the video, I think it will answer all your questions. Also, it’s not like X will be totally deprecated, XWayland is an API implementation of it that will be supported forever.
Please have a look at an X maintainers very own presentation: [VIDEO] Wayland is not a middle man as it is the compositor itself as well - it does the minimal amount of work necessary to compose the desktop. X on the other hand just transfers messages between clients and the compositor without doing any actual work (x render functions are almost never used by modern applications)
Here's a decade-old talk on Wayland [VIDEO] Wayland has been the default on Fedora and Arch w/ GNOME since around 2018, 5 years ago. It became the default on Debian w/ GNOME in 2019, 4 years ago. So yes, long time coming. KDE took longer but it's now finally ready.