On Wednesday, 17 September 2025 04:25:58 British Summer Time Alexis wrote: > Wol <[email protected]> writes: > > So we've now basically got four compositors to replace the X > > server. > > It's actually many more than four: > https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/List_of_software_for_Wayland#Compositors > > This list isn't necessarily all the compositors available; > e.g. Deepin's "Treeland" compositor isn't listed, because it > doesn't yet appear to be packaged for Gentoo (at least in either > the main repo or overlays). > > As far as i'm aware, there are now four main compositor groups: > > * KDE/Plasma > * GNOME/Mutter > * Aquamarine/Hyprland > * wlroots-based compositors, e.g. Sway and Wayfire > > i'm not including Weston in this list because it's not meant to be > used as an end-user compositor, just as a minimalist > implementation of a Wayland compositor, as an example for > compositor devs. Aquamarine is, i understand it, a > reimplementation of functionality provided by wlroots. > > However, there are various other compositors, e.g. Miracle and > Niri. > > Compositors can mix'n'match which Wayland extension protocols they > use - cf. the Wayland Explorer i linked to in my previous post - > which allows compositors to be created which only implement the > extensions they need. For example, a compositor for a kiosk might > only implement certain protocols, whereas a compositor intended > for desktop use might implement many more. > > For more background, i recommend this presentation by former Xorg > dev Daniel Stone: > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 > > Slides: > > https://people.freedesktop.org/~daniels/lca2013-wayland-x11.pdf > > > Alexis.
Thanks for these links. Made me reminisce of Nokia! :-) I can't recall how far back (2015-16?) xserver 'stopped working' reliably on a 2x monitor setup and an A10 APU, running Plasma with the amdgpu driver. Setting up the primary monitor would switch on its own from left to the right monitor after a restart, the resolution would change on one of the monitors and other such annoying 'features' which increased user complaints and prompted me to look at wayland. I think it was concurrent with kde5 coming out. Not sure. Within a year wayland and kwin had become more stable and totally usable as a daily desktop driver. I can't recall if chromium or firefox were not fully compatible in terms of window decorations, or minimizing, resizing functionality. Anyway, soon enough this was also resolved. For all these years I have been using Wayland on a number of gentoo systems and hardware and have not come across any annoyances interfering with a desktop. Applications render fast and reliably, window positioning is stable, screen placement and resolution remains as originally set, etc. I don't use all the functionality of Wayland, e.g. screen sharing, or remote desktop, but using everyday desktop productivity applications and media players on a screen works faultlessly here. I even tried to configure sddm to work with kwin and weston a year or two ago, but it didn't work at the time. PS. I was surprised to see the Xlibre fork. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but what is the point of continuing with X11 in 2025? Nostalgia?
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