Xorg Vs Wayland Is Just A Technical Detail

Key Takeaways

the other week I did this video on X Whalen Video Bridge it is a really cool project and you go and check it out but in the blog post accompanying it I came across this quote that I didn't feel like deserved to be this one-off thing that I said and just forgot about I felt like it needed to be expanded upon and deserved a full dedicated video the quote in question is this Weyland is a technical detail and we want any switch to be as transparent as possible for as many apps as possible for all cases including cases we haven't thought of but the most important part is Wayland is a technical detail now this is spoken in regards to KDE and screencasting in Discord but applies to any desktop and all facets of problems on Weyland and just Linux generally if you are reading and submitting to issue issue trackers if you are Reading and Responding to mailing lists if you're reading developer blogs if you're watching some random Aussie neckbeard rant about things on Linux it's probably fair to say you're a reasonably technical Linux user now obviously there is a spectrum here but it's not like you're the kind of person who's just installed Linux for the first time you don't even know what a terminal is you have no idea what a shell is it's probably fair to say you're the kind of person who likes to dive into the Weeds on the Merit of X Org the merits of Whalen why Waylon's been ready for years why it's never going to be ready or moving out of strictly in the desktop space why pipe wire is better than pulse audio what our favorite terminals are what our favorite shows are and all manner of other questions and all of this stuff is really fun to discuss and I have no plans to ever stop but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter and to that regular less technical user isn't really that important take this x Weyland Video Bridge for example this is a simple tool to make Discord and other screencasting applications like slack and Skype which don't properly support xdd desktop portals as in they don't support them whatsoever to be able to capture both your desktop and Whalen clients and not just other ex-weiling windows but all of those details xdg desktop portals whale and clients X Wayland and especially how the bridge actually functioned in the background by abusing some of these like X11 extensions and doing things that basically makes it a hack that really shouldn't work but it does all of these are just technical details that need to happen in the background to make it actually work one great example of this is in the Foss world we can all pretend that Foss is great because all of us read the source code and all of us understand exactly what all of the projects we are using do but we know at the end of the day that for most of the projects we're using we sort of just trust that somebody else has done that and then move on with our day maybe a couple of projects here and there we actually go and read the source code of and make sure they're safe but do you do that for every application have you ever done that for the Linux kernel or any big project that would legitimately take you you a lot of time to do the answer is probably not because it's just a technical detail and doesn't really matter to what you're doing on a day-to-day basis ultimately what matters to the user is does the thing I expect to work actually work say for example screencasting in Discord it doesn't matter to the user that they're using xorg or Weyland they expect screencasting to work so it should be working does it work the way I expect it to if we go and try to do the screencast does it operate in a way that doesn't really make any sense so if you go from xorg in one version where screencasting just works to Weyland in another version with the bridge now you've got this extra portal prompt that appears to go and select the window is it a major deal maybe not but it does depend on how different it is from the regular interaction and with that do you need to learn learn some new method that is maybe more or less convenient but in the end gets the result you want while it would be really cool if everybody out there cared about the internals of their system how everything pieces together so if they want to go and make changes they can very easily go and do so when things go wrong they know where to start you know looking around rather than just hopping onto a distro forum and saying computer broke please fix I don't think it's inherently a bad thing that a lot of users out there just aren't really concerned with the details all of us use Linux for completely different reasons some of us are developers tinkerers and you want to get into the weeds of your system and find out how everything works together some of us just aren't happy with the state of Windows and heard that Linux is pretty good now and just want to see what it's like and some of us bought a steam deck and don't even know what a distro is what KDE is what a desktop environment is what any of the details of Linux are all they know is they have this device that they can play video games on and that's all that really matters in the steam decks case it doesn't matter that it's using wine and X whale and in game scope and all of these other things none of these really matter when all you're trying to do is play a game what matters is does the game work well or does the game not work well in the case of the steam deck a lot of the time yeah it works exactly like it should I don't know how many of you guys been seeing this but there is a surprising number of people who are using the steam deck as like a Mini PC not as like an alternative to a laptop or a desktop or something like that but using it as their main system if if you plug a USBC dock in you can go and plug in a monitor all the peripherals you need and it works just as well as a laptop and honestly is far cheaper and more powerful than a lot of the devices out there a lot of these people aren't just like you know really hardcore Linux enthusiasts who really want to be running Linux on a day-to-day basis because those people are probably already running Linux there is a lot of people trying this who are kind of just new to Linux they don't care about what's going on in the background they just saw the steam deck is this super cool device so like let's just see what happens using it as a desktop computer how it works in the background doesn't really matter even for those of us who would generally consider ourselves you know relatively technical users we have no life we are running Arch Linux Gen 2 void Linux Bedrock something like that even in this case there is a lot of stuff about our systems we just consider to be technical details most of the time unless you live and breathe a system like lfs for example all of us have parts of our system we don't really care to think about it just does the thing and we move on with our day in my case that's networking I run network manager I have no idea how to do network configuration network manager just makes things magically work and I have basically like a rudimentary understanding of VPN and that's about as far as it goes sure I could go and dig into it if I really wanted to but it does the thing I needed to do so I just don't really care I would much rather spend my time on the things that I generally consider more important like my desktop like my terminal like my browser and things like that now whoa the ultimate goal would be to make Wayland a technical detail that just doesn't matter if your desktop is running Excel if it's running Wayland fundamentally everything just works to the user the same way as it stands today that's not exactly the case you have simple things like the fact that you need something like the X Whalen Video Bridge to make applications like Discord Skype slack and things like that work the way they should the fact that in video cards their Nvidia cards and on some desktops don't exactly offer the best experience things are getting better but it's still something you have to think about or the fact that if you want to do some basic theme which would be just a compositor change on xorg now that might be an entire desktop change swapping from something like sway to hyperland just so you can do things like you know rounded corners for example or gradient borders all of these things are technical details which right now the regular user and pretty much any user on Weyland needs to be thinking about but maybe one day we can get to a point where those are just things that are just going on in the background and don't really matter if you want to go and dig into them go ahead and do so and I'm absolutely gonna do so and I hope that people stick around to go and see that but for most people that just want to get on with their day and just want to use this system as their system it doesn't really matter but those are just my two cents let me know what you think if you've got any thoughts let me know in the comment section down below and if you like this video I'm gonna go and like the video and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here check out the patreon scrub Sally Bara pay linked down below that's gonna be it for me and I'm daily driving Weyland now [Applause] [Music]