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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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]

199 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Also better isolation of applications and better support for multiple screens.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'll give you the multiple screens (not a use case I have myself, so I don't pay attention to support quality). Isolation of applications is another thing that most users don't really care that much about, I would say.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

It's legitimately important if you want to be able to pull random software from places and not have your system compromised, a la smartphone OSes.

It's not the whole story -- things still aren't entirely sandboxed aside from that -- but without it, the GUI is a big security hole.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

users shouldn't have to care about security. it should be the baseline.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You never care about security until you get your credentials stolen

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

And don't forget 1:1 gestures and the Crash-Resilient Wayland Compositing that keep the application alive even tho the "compositor" crash, so it does restart without any data loss.

Edit: forgot to mention the lockscreen protocol, because on xorg if the lockscreen crash then you view the desktop and you have the device unlocked!