this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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I thought I'll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

I'll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (11 children)

Thank you for this nice thread! My question: what is Wayland all about? Why would I want to use it and not any of the older alternatives?

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

Wayland has better support for some newer in-demand features, like multiple monitors, very high resolutions, and scaling. It's also carrying less technical debt around, and has more people actively working on it. However, it still has issues with nvidia video cards, and there are still a few pieces of uncommon software that won't work with it.

The only alternative is X. Its main advantage over Wayland is network transparency (essentially it can be its own remote client/server system), which is important for some use cases. And it has no particular issues with nvidia. However, it's essentially in maintenance mode—bugs are patched, but no new features are being added—and the code is old and crufty.

If you want the network transparency, have an nvidia card (for now), or want to use one of the rare pieces of software that doesn't work with Wayland/XWayland, use X. Otherwise, use whatever your distro provides, which is Wayland for most of the large newbie-friendly distros.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

The network transparency thing is no longer a limitation with Wayland btw, thanks to PipeWire and Waypipe.

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