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[Linux.conf.au 2013] - The real story behind Wayland and X

HackersOnBoard · 34.9K views · 2013-03-27 · 45:35

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Overview

A linux.conf.au 2013 talk by a Wayland developer who previously worked on X, telling the history of X and why Wayland was created. It covers X's hardware abstraction and architecture and why they became problematic for modern graphics.

On Hacker News

Whenever Wayland versus X comes up, HN points to this talk as the authoritative explanation from an X maintainer of why X was replaced.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2016–2023

Topics

Linux & open-source ecosystemsComputer graphics & renderingOperating systems & kernels
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waylandx11linux graphicsdisplay serversxorg

What people said

kaba0 · 2022-02 · Recommendation

Please have a look at an X maintainers very own presentation: [VIDEO] Wayland is not a middle man as it is the compositor itself as well - it does the minimal amount of work necessary to compose the desktop. X on the other hand just transfers messages between clients and the compositor without doing any actual work (x render functions are almost never used by modern applications)

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tux1968 · 2021-03 · Recommendation

I tried to give a hint about the basic reason of trying to get out from under the weight of a huge code base that had become old and crufty while the very architecture it was designed around was becoming moot since things were shifting to client side rendering already. Couldn't find a good article on short notice, but there's a decent video from back in 2013 about it. [VIDEO]

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kaba0 · 2021-03 · Recommendation

Here you are: [VIDEO] It’s a great presentation by one of the guys behind wayland, who worked on X a lot before. Basically, X has a fundamentally misaligned abstraction of the underlying hardware - which is expected based on its age. When used with a compositor, it is basically a middle-man with no function whatsoever. So Wayland decided to cut out the middle man and pass events directly between client and compositor. But please watch the video, I think it will answer all your questions. Also, it’s not like X will be totally deprecated, XWayland is an API implementation of it that will be supported forever.

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Sources

Video by HackersOnBoard, played through YouTube.

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