If anyone wants to give an ELI5 or a link to a video that ELI5 I’d be incredibly thankful

I swear that all the stuff I find is like super in depth technical stuff that just loses me in no time flat

  • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • havokdj@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Wayland is a lot more secure and the way it handles clients is a lot more sane in todays age, but thing is, it is a hell of a lot more complicated if you come from a window manager background, and your choice of applications is incredibly small. Sure you can run a lot of your stuff in XWayland, but what exactly is the point of running wayland if you are going to run less secure X apps with 94% of the same vulnerabilities?

      X is less secure, but the security of your system from the outside is far *faaar more important than the security on the inside. Only when an intruder actually infiltrates your system do you have a real concern, and that’s only talking about remote access. Physical access given enough time is root access.

      A lot of people tout X as being considerably more bloated than wayland which is why the project is basically in maintenance mode, wayland is definitely a lot quicker than X, but X has many reasons including support from literally every single linux application out there, something wayland is very likely never going to acheive even with XWayland.

      • Limonene@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        This is false. X is not less secure than Wayland. It does have a different security model, which can become insecure if you misuse it. I don’t think people really care about situations where multiple user accounts access the same display.

        In my opinion, the benefits of xdotool far outweigh any benefits gained by Wayland’s security model. It’s impossible to make xdotool in Wayland, because of its security model.

        • havokdj@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          X is inherently less secure due to the fact alone that, given enough time, new vulnerabilities will come out that will not be patched because X11 is EOL. Yes it has a different security model, but that security model is not very well implemented because X has an enormous code base that, at the end of the day is still not bug free (nothing is). There is a lot of legacy code contained in X that legitimately does not even have a function because there is nothing around today to use it.

          Larger codebase = more moving parts = more code to exploit. That’s the benefit to wayland aside from active support by the X/Wayland devs.