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What is the best alternative to X.Org?
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Wayland
All
18
Experiences
Pros
9
Cons
8
Specs
Top
Pro
Simplifies the graphic stack
Wayland simplifies the graphics stack by trying to force everything through a GEM/DRM stack and straight into the kernel. Furthermore, it manages compositing itself.
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Con
XWayland handles popup windows poorly
XWayland is necessary to support the vast majority of GUIs that don't yet fully support Wayland (e.g. Firefox). Popup windows and context menus in XWayland behave badly, flickering, opening in strange sizes, and refusing to reopen within the same session. Seems to be best documented here and here.
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Pro
Better security
Reduced use of root and isolating the input and output of every window.
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Con
No mechanisms to configure input
Tools like xinput and xmodmap that help customize keyboard and mouse input are incompatible with Wayland, have no corollary, and there is no clear roadmap for providing their functionality.
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Pro
Best for touchscreen
The complete gesture support makes it way better compared to x
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Con
Little driver support
Most closed sourced drivers do not support the KMS/shared-GEM/shared-DRM technologies on which Wayland works. While this may be okay for open source purists, who only want to use graphic cards that have open source drivers available, it may not sit well with people who spend a lot of money for high-end graphic cards only to get some crappy 3D performance. Although it should be noted that NVIDIA has declared that they will start supporting Wayland, it may take years before Wayland fully supports most high-end drivers.
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Pro
Wayland exclusive apps
In addition to xorg app running under xwayland, there are many wayland only apps, such as waydroid, which lets you run the android userland directly on linux.
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Con
A big mess
Wayland breaks everything and then expects others to fix the wreckage it caused on their own expense.
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Pro
The default
If you don't have a nvidia graphics card, ubuntu and fedora will use wayland instead of xorg. As of plasma 6, wayland will be the default session, but distros may change this.
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Con
Breaks everything
Stuff that worked 20years is now broken...
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Pro
Performance
Compositing performance is several times faster than xorg.
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Con
Superior technology but still not ready for everyday use
Wayland is great for developers, it's both technologically and architecturally superior to X, but X is the de-facto standard display server protocol for the *nix world for so long that you can basically expect everything to work with X (user applications, graphics drivers, DEs, etc. etc.) which cannot be said for Wayland. Actually there are still too many issues with Wayland that I think it's still far from being ready for the general users/consumers today. It seems there are still years of work ahead before Wayland can fully replace X as suitable for everyday use other than running some GUI text-editors and IDEs for coding, and maybe by that time both Wayland and X will be replaced by something newer... Wayland surely has superior technology and design, but those don't necessarily mean much for the general users today (remember the RISC vs. CISC war back in the 90's, and that back when Linux kernel was first developed, it is arguably inferior to the MINIX kernel in terms of technological advance and architectural design)
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Pro
Prevents screen tearing
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Con
Most desktops are not supported
The only destops that can currenty run on wayland are GNOME and Enlightenment, KDE has limited support and many other desktops and window mangers won't switch. Its also almost only working on GNU+Linux which negates the to be an X11 replacement.
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Pro
Easy to maintain
Wayland has no drawing APIs. Instead, a Wayland client gets a DRM buffer handle, which is practically just a pointer to a graphics memory. Practically Wayland does not care how the client draws to that buffer, it only copies the client's buffers on the screen. The removes a lot of complexity (because Wayland just pushes the complex stuff to the other layers of the stack) and by making the clients responsible for all the rendering, they can be smarter on how they do things like double-buffering for example.
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Con
Not much used in the Unix world
Currently its only nearly usable in the Linux world, everything else still uses X11.
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Pro
Best Linux user experience overall
Very responsive Touchpad performance + 3,4-finger Gestures, Smooth Animations and No Screen Tearing. Also compatibility for old applications using XWayland.
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Specs
License:
MIT License
Type:
Windowing system / Display server
Programming Language:
C
Initial release:
September 30, 2008
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Mir
All
3
Experiences
Pros
1
Cons
2
Top
Con
Created by Canonical to fit only their needs
Mir isn't bad. It just doesn't fit in the world outside Ubuntu products like Wayland does. Instead of Canonical choosing to use Wayland as their next generation display server they choose to go their own way, which does not contribute back to the community in any meaningful way, in that area.
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Pro
Great Unity support
Since Mir is being developed by Canonical to fit the need of the Unity DE and Ubuntu, on many different devices, from desktops to laptops to mobile devices and tablets. Because of this, Mir is great for Unity, in many different ways (security, efficiency, functionality, etc.).
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Con
Deorbited
Much like the space station of the same name, Mir did not last. It's now been abandoned and will probably fall out of use, even with efforts by some to try and maintain it.
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