Wayland is like X11. Xorg implements the X11 protocol. There are other X11 server implementations — XWin32 is one example on Windows.
Nothing has changed with Wayland except we have a new thing and lots of groups writing compositors. And this is great — Mutter, Kwin, wlroots, Mir — and they will all speak a common protocol for putting stuff on the screen and handing input events. And projects with similar use-cases “desktops” are standardizing on common dbus interfaces for non-display stuff.
This is genuinely so much better than the Xorg monoculture. Wayland’s design has made it possible for lots of different groups to implement display servers and have interoperability because what we had before was “X11 actually means do what Xorg does.”
There’s lots of in-fighting about the scope of Wayland and people that want to make a protocol for putting pixels on the screen also handle “desktop stuff” like audio, screenshots, screen recording, keybindings, input automation, authentication. I think this is misguided because it would effectively turn Wayland into a generic message bus between “apps with windows” and the display server when we already have a generic message bus for every application — dbus.
which after shaking out will be promoted to org.freedesktop.* after standardization. Despite the fact that notifications have been "DE specific" in the same way for years and years nobody seems to complain about org.freedesktop.Notifications.
Nothing has changed with Wayland except we have a new thing and lots of groups writing compositors. And this is great — Mutter, Kwin, wlroots, Mir — and they will all speak a common protocol for putting stuff on the screen and handing input events. And projects with similar use-cases “desktops” are standardizing on common dbus interfaces for non-display stuff.
This is genuinely so much better than the Xorg monoculture. Wayland’s design has made it possible for lots of different groups to implement display servers and have interoperability because what we had before was “X11 actually means do what Xorg does.”
There’s lots of in-fighting about the scope of Wayland and people that want to make a protocol for putting pixels on the screen also handle “desktop stuff” like audio, screenshots, screen recording, keybindings, input automation, authentication. I think this is misguided because it would effectively turn Wayland into a generic message bus between “apps with windows” and the display server when we already have a generic message bus for every application — dbus.
Right now we have things like:
org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot | org.kde.kwin.Screenshot
org.gnome.Shell.Screencast | org.kde.kwin.Screencast
which after shaking out will be promoted to org.freedesktop.* after standardization. Despite the fact that notifications have been "DE specific" in the same way for years and years nobody seems to complain about org.freedesktop.Notifications.