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 :)

  • jecxjo@midwest.socialEnglish
    11·
    5 hours ago

    One thing to note with X11’s design, having a server and client, there was nothing requiring both to be on the same machine. You could run an X11 client on your local machine, ssh into a remote machine and use its X11 server.

    Lets say you are home and can ssh into a work server. You could run Firefox on the work machine, using it’s network and have the visual parts show up on your home computer.

    This was very much a Unix, shared resource style design. Servers and thin clients. Put all your horse power in the big machine and connect using your crappy low power system to it.

    • qaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 minutes ago

      Keep in mind that in practice this didn’t work that well, it wasn’t very efficient at displaying modern interfaces over the network. Showing a simple text editor over LAN worked fine, but using Firefox from another place was quite spotty.