On Wed, 11 Jun 2025 14:26:44 -0400 Steven J Abner <[email protected]> said:
> On Wed, Jun 11 2025 at 05:30:48 PM +0000, Carsten Haitzler > <[email protected]> wrote: > > wayland is a PROTOCOL > > From this conversation, trying to understand. > So: > X protocol => X11 => aplications there is (in practice) only a SINGLE x server (xorg). yes in theory others exist but... there is only one. this speaks x11 protocol to clients. > and > wayland protocol => wlroots? => compositor/windowmanager => application wlroots is like a toolkit used by some developers to make wayland compositors. kwin, gnome shell and enlightenment don't use wlroots - they have independent implementations. ALL of these use the wayland libraries to implement speaking wayland protocol. clients do the same thing. you could implement clients and servers without these libraries as long as they speak the same wayland protocol. in a wayland universe there is no single "server" like xorg's xserver. there are many. gnome shell (mutter) kwin enlightenment sway labwc wayfire weston hyprland ... and many others actually in a wayland universe the window manager is ALSO a compositor - always. it ALSO is the display server (it does what xorg's xserver does). it does all of these functions in one place. client apps speak wayland protocol to the wayland compositor. each project could split these functions apart if it wanted to and implement it as a suite of processes that all talk to each-other. it could implement it as a modular process with loadable modules. it could be a single big monolithic binary. it could be anything it likes as long as it speaks standard wayland protocol to clients (and supports the extension protocols and shell protocols that clients expect). > where compositor is wayland's term for window manager? > Steve -- ------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" -------------- Carsten Haitzler - [email protected]
