I stumbled upon this post regarding an earlier rant about wayland, but now it seems fine, according to the author.
After using Linux for nearly 5 years, using both depending on distros defaults, I have to admit that I never got the core/main/game changing differences between wayland and x11.
To be said, that I also dont do fancy linux things other than basic sysadmin stuff and from time to time repair the mess my curiosity left behind.
Could somebody explain the differences between those two and afterwards maybe also say some words about what this has to do with the difference between window managers and desktop environments?
I am also happy about links to good blog posts or stuff, that target this very questions (as long as the questions make sence of course). Thanks beforehand :)
I won’t bother going into technical details about x11 and wayland since other people already explained it much better than i ever could, but basically wayland is supposed to be replacing x11, because the codebase is so old now that it has become very hard to maintain and implement new features without breaking things. A window manager pretty much only handles the placement of windows on the screen, and you have to use seperate applications for setting a wallpaper, getting notifications, application launcher, etc. Whereas a desktop environment is a fully fledged out of the box experience. I personally really like window managers because i like the workflow of tiling window managers in particular, which places the windows in a predefined layout for you. Something that might be a bit confusing is that window managers on wayland are called compositors, which is because in wayland the window manager also has to do it’s own compositing. In x11 you could use something like picom, which is a seperate compositor program that you could use to add graphical effects to any window manager, but on wayland this doesn’t exist and the window manager has to implement its own compositing.