Out of all the changes happening to Linux I think the most important one,
by far, is Wayland, superceeding even Wine/Proton and all the popularity growth
as foolish as it may sound.

To quote Wayland.fyi "wayland at its core is a very simple wire protocol".
I think that's beautiful and it's exactly how a display server should be.
Modern computer use revolves around graphical environements and most
importantly programming most of the time now is done in graphical
environements, that means that the people who make everything you run
most likely use more than the command line to help them create the cool
stuff they make which puts the environements on the pedestal as one of the
most important parts of the system.
Doesn't it make sense for this part to be extensible, maintanble and secure?
For it to be able to take Linux into the upcoming decades? From what I've seen
Wayland is already [1] pushing Linux graphics into heights that we didn't believe
we could reach before and the protocol has ~20 more years to have been alive for
as long as X11 is now, just imagine all that can happen in those two decades :D

With that being said,Plan 9 Wayland is not another flavor of GNU/Linux X11.
That comes with a lot strenghts and some weaknesses misunderstood strenghts.

# Here's a fraction of those strenghts
*The compositor is the server, there is no pipelines where something goes
there and that puts it there and then it goes there until it finally gets
shown to the user
*You can read the code! And I mean read it and understand it, libwayland has
around 10K LOC, wld has ~7K, swc ~13K and velox,a  WM built on these
has ~3K. That puts a complete functional implementation at ~33k LOC, compare
that with the ~490K lines of xorg-server!!! Even Wlroots only has ~72k and it
includes a fully realized Vulkan renderer.
*Not supporting global hotkeys is a good thing, that might sound insane but hear
me out! Isn't it simpler to use IPCs? mako, a notification daemon allows you to
dismiss notifications with 'makoctl dismiss', ALSA allows you to add volume with
'amixer sset', instead of messying up the protocol with universal hotkeys we can
simply call these IPC commands from our compositor. This prevents keylogging and
also introduces a more modular solution that's also easier to use and implement.

# On the Wayland implementations and userspace
If you're not convinced yet then allow me to point you to Wayland.fyi, it's a
Wayland special interest group that is responsible for me switching to Wayland
in the first place. I highly recommend checking out their site as it busts some
common myths and offers alternatives to the popular Wayland implementations that
might be more in line with your workflow and/or computing ideology.

# Misconceptions that Wayland.fyi doesn't address so I'd like to
*Wayland doesn't support screensharing and video recording without PipeWire
**It does using wlr-export-dmabuf-unstable-v1

If you'd like to see cool stuff happening with Wayland in your feed reader of
choice I've started a wayland.rocks feed which I will be updating with Wayland
news and cool projects built on it :D


In the spirit of Wayland and improving on outdated and flawed technologies
the feed provided is only available as atom 1.0 
      

---

Home - wayland.rocks feed - src - Made with 💛, honest code stealing and no AI