The Real Story Behind Wayland and X - Daniel Stone (linux.conf.au 2013)

Mladen Mijatov · 103.7K views · 2013-02-08 · 45:35

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Overview

Daniel Stone, a longtime X and Wayland developer, explains at linux.conf.au 2013 why X11's design became untenable and what motivated Wayland. The talk walks through X's history and accumulated cruft.

On Hacker News

HN treats it as the definitive, funny and educational answer to why X could not be fixed, and links it in almost every Wayland vs X argument.

Recommended by 13 HN people across 10 months · HN mentions 2013–2026

Topics

Linux & open-source ecosystems Computer graphics & rendering

What people said

DyslexicAtheist · 2021-02 · Strong recommendation
> when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. Daniel Stone[0] incredibly funny and educational talk[1] from 2013 could help many critics who missed the 3 decade long ongoing discussion of why X is bad . We've talked about this already in the mid 90ies (when there were no alternatives) and now 8 years after this popular linux.conf.au talk, people still having troubles understanding why X has always been a terrible tradeoff for both security and performance (well for literally everything). [0] [LINK] [1] The Real Story Behind Wayland and X [VIDEO] edit: BUT X IS THE UNIX WAY! << so what is the 1 thing X does, and what is it doing well?
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SXX · 2021-02 · Strong recommendation
Mandatory video to watch for all X fans: > Daniel Stone ~ The real story behind Wayland and X' [VIDEO]
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jabirali · 2020-08 · Strong recommendation
I remember finding this video enlightening, a talk on the subject by someone who has worked on both X and Wayland: [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by Mladen Mijatov, played through YouTube.

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