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Linux Mint 21.3 Review: solid Wayland support!
(invidious.slipfox.xyz)
A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.
The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.
$CURRENT_YEAR
, flock to Linux Mint!; Apple Silicon users will want to check out Asahi Linux.
Wayland isn't a window manager or a desktop environment, it's a display server protocol. I don't personally use Mint, but I skimmed through the video and it seems if you update to the latest version of Mint, you can use the Wayland session, but it's still very work in progress and you should probably just stick to the X session for the time being until they work everything out and get it to a more usable state.
And for the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment: A window manager is pretty self explanatory... it manages windows! It's what handles the positioning, sizing, etc. of windows (simple explanation). Examples of a window manager are things like i3wm, swaywm, bspwm, awesomewm, KWin (KDE Plasma's window manager), Mutter (GNOME's window manager), etc.
A desktop environment is essentially a "suite" of things (including a window manager!) that most people would expect from a computer, things like a status bar/task bar, control panels, etc. Examples of a desktop environment are things like KDE Plasma, GNOME, MATE, Xfce, Cinnamon, Budgie, etc.
I simplified things quite a bit, but that's the jist of it. If you want to get into semantics, technically KWin and Mutter are also Wayland compositors, but that's a whole other can of worms. [insert your favorite search engine's name] is your friend if you want to learn more from someone who can probably explain things way better than I can, but hopefully I was able to somewhat help clarify the differences, lol.