Question about the future of Xorg

[Carsten Haitzler]

On Wed, 11 Jun 2025 14:26:44 -0400 Steven J Abner <pheonix.sja at att.net> said:

> On Wed, Jun 11 2025 at 05:30:48 PM +0000, Carsten Haitzler 
> <raster at rasterman.com> wrote:
> > wayland is a PROTOCOL
> 
>  From this conversation, trying to understand.
> So:
>  X protocol => X11 => aplications

there is (in practice) only a SINGLE x server (xorg). yes in theory others
exist but... there is only one. this speaks x11 protocol to clients.

> and
>  wayland protocol => wlroots? => compositor/windowmanager => application

wlroots is like a toolkit used by some developers to make wayland compositors.
kwin, gnome shell and enlightenment don't use wlroots - they have independent
implementations. ALL of these use the wayland libraries to implement speaking
wayland protocol. clients do the same thing. you could implement clients and
servers without these libraries as long as they speak the same wayland protocol.

in a wayland universe there is no single "server" like xorg's xserver. there
are many.

gnome shell (mutter)
kwin
enlightenment
sway
labwc
wayfire
weston
hyprland

... and many others actually

in a wayland universe the window manager is ALSO a compositor - always. it ALSO
is the display server (it does what xorg's xserver does). it does all of these
functions in one place. client apps speak wayland protocol to the wayland
compositor.

each project could split these functions apart if it wanted to and implement
it as a suite of processes that all talk to each-other. it could implement it
as a modular process with loadable modules. it could be a single big monolithic
binary. it could be anything it likes as long as it speaks standard wayland
protocol to clients (and supports the extension protocols and shell protocols
that clients expect).

> where compositor is wayland's term for window manager?
> Steve



-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
Carsten Haitzler - raster at rasterman.com