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Programs running graphically (Firefox, your file browser, etc.) need a way to tell the system "draw these pixels here". That's what the display server does; it takes all these applications, works out where their windows are and manages that pixel data.

XOrg has historically been the display server in common use, but it's very old and very cobbled together. It generally struggles with "modern" things that must people expect today. Multimonitor setups, vsync, hdr and all that. They work, but support is hacked together and brittle.

Wayland is a replacement for XOrg that was designed from scratch to fix a lot of these issues. But it's been an uphill battle because XOrg is the final boss of legacy codebases.

tl;dr They're both software that manages drawing pixels from applications to the display.

I'll try to explain:

In the past we only had text terminals without a graphical interface ~1990 (sh / bash / tty). so the display server (Xorg / formaly known as X11) was born. it's a piece of software that allows programs to not only print text to screen but to draw complex geometrical shapes. This allowed for gui programs that use frameworks like qt or gtk or motif... to draw buttons and shit using Xorg.

For having mutliple "windows" / "programs" running they invented a window manager, that drew a border around the windows with some min / max /close buttons and the modern gui was good to go. btw. the next step are desktop environments like kde or gnome but that would be too much for this post.

Back to display server (Xorg) and window manager (kwin, mutter, metacity, dwm, awesome, i3...): the design of xorg is super old and has many shortcomings like hdr, variable refreshrate or security: every window can read the contents of or produce input for other windows which is a nightmare for todays security standards.

So wayland was invented to use state of the art concepts and design. Here comes the big problem: State of the art concepts required wayland to not be a display manager like Xorg. wayland is more like a protocol that defines how to draw windows, resize and close them or how they are allowed to talk to each other. Since wayland is only a protocol+ the window manager now needs to do the heavy lifting of coordinating this protocol, drawing and stuff like that, which in turn results in way less window managers that support wayland because they are complex as hell.

Since modern software needs to support a heck of a lot of different ways for applications to interact with each other rewriting these functionality for wayland needs time. thats the reason desktop sharing/recording or muting your mic with a keyboard shortcut when the webex window was not in focus wasn't possible at first. new solutiones needed to be developed for that (pipewire for example). Many programs would run in an xorg window that was implemented as a wayland window (xwayland) which made transitioning to wayland much easier but introduced new problems.

At the moment we are in a transitional phase. many programs already work without problems, but many software still require features wayland doesn't have and might never implement. Everyone needing that software is hating on wayland. everyone needing variable refreshrate, fractional scaling or security prefers to use wayland. And the fighting begins.

Disclaimer: There might be errors, simplifications or misunderstandings on my side but thats the way i understood if. Feel free to correct any mistakes on my part.

XOrg and Wayland are two different programs that serve the same purpose, which is to act as a sort of middleman between the graphics driver, the window manager(s), and the many programs you're running.

XOrg is ancient. Early 80s ancient. It's been added to since those days as need arose, and is therefore full of weird messy legacy stuff and jury-rigs. But it is also what Linux has used for a very, very long time, and is therefore like. Ol' Reliable workhorse, yanno?

Wayland is a new and bold step that rewrites the entire system from the ground up to address the shortcomings of XOrg (don't ask me to specify, I actually don't know), it has, however, been criticised for not having (and devs downright not wanting it to have) certain features that XOrg has. But it can also run applications that expect XOrg with a thing (jargon escapes me) called XWayland.

Personally I've used both. And... Uh...

Wayland was a bit faster and smoother maybe? But it also caused some specific applications to misbehave and get all crashy-buggy. But that was a personal experience and may well have been my fault.

Waland is the British half of the mega corp Waland-Yutani. Sometimes called Wa-Yu, or simply "the company"

Founded by Charles Bishop Wayland, the totally not evil billionaire industrialist, Wayland LLC was known for energy production, computer technology, and planetary terraforming before it was acquired in a hostile takeover by the Japanese Yutani corp in 2099.

No matter! Pick a side now and join the jihad!

Super-short version:

The system that Linux uses to draw anything on the screen (showing the desktop, your windows, their contents, etc) is called a display server.

Linux has been using a display server called the X Window System (or x11) since its inception, but it's ancient and has limitations that can't be fixed without breaking everything that depends on it.

The Wayland compositor is the new display server that will be replacing x11, improving security and adding support for newer features like HDR. It's nearly ready for a full release now, and is already the default for some Linux distributions.

It's a standard to display programs and let them interact with each other. The old way is X11 which is a big program handling all of that. With Wayland every desktop and window manager (like KDE, Gnome, i3wm, Sway, etc) take up the role of Xorg themselves, giving them better control.

Every program has to be changed to work with Wayland. Those that don't run through Xwayland, a program mimicking the old X11 standards on Wayland.

The end goal of wayland is that you shouldn't ever have to know what it is.

What is Wayland? It is such a basic concept I don't need to explain it to you. Of course I understand it.

These guys are nuts. Wayland is a town in the Midwest of the USA.

Wayland is basically just X12

Wayland is a display protocall. What does that mean? Well, it describes how a program on linux tha displays graphics to a user should work. Examples of programs which do this include kwin, mutter, and sway. It's why you see stuff on your monitor and why when you open an app, it's in a window, which can be moved.

All that along with a good amount of supplementary tools, makes up wayland.

Currently we are transitioning from a 40 year old protocal called X11 which has many issues and few people willing to work on. Wayland offers a codebase without the spaghetti, more security, easier feature development, and to a point backwards compatibility.

In short it's essentially a protocol that defines what type of requests must be sent between applications and a compositor.

Like you are 5: Wayland is the thing that brings the beep boop from the computer to a screen. It's the son/daughter from Xorg which is old af, and needs to die because no one wants to work on it trillions lines of code.

Eli5: Wayland is a new way for Linux to make things appear on your screen, things like windows, graphics, and even your whole desktop.

The old way was called Xorg. It has been around for a very long time, and works pretty well, but the code is veryyyy messy and many developers wanted a new and easier way to make things appear on your screen, so they made Wayland.

(It's debatable how much easier Wayland actually is vs Xorg, but at this point most major distros are switching over to Wayland, so it's a moot point)

I am also a noob, but here is how I think it is: What your Computer is doing is not what you see. Until now we were using an oldschool way to display stuff called X11 aka. Xorg.

But this is very old and has 3 problems:

• It is very old and hard to improve (code very complex, spagetthi, whatever)
• Has security problems (I dont know what or how)
• No modern features yet (HDR, and so on)

Because people want to use new display features to work and security, people built this display software code whatever new from scratch. And this is Wayland.

My neighbors dog is Wayland. He's a good boy!

In short a graphics interface with code that is not old af!

Wayland Jennings, a great country singer