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THE VIDEO SHELF · wayland and x11

[Linux.conf.au 2013] - The real story behind Wayland and X

A linux.conf.au 2013 talk by a Wayland developer who previously worked on X, telling the history of X and why Wayland was created. It covers X's hardware abstraction and architecture and why they became problematic for modern graphics.

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Why HN readers recommended it

Whenever Wayland versus X comes up, HN points to this talk as the authoritative explanation from an X maintainer of why X was replaced.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
HackersOnBoard
Topic
wayland and x11
Format
talk
Level
intermediate
HN recommenders in dataset
2
HN mentions in dataset
6
Recommendation years in dataset
2016–2023

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • I tried to give a hint about the basic reason of trying to get out from under the weight of a huge code base that had become old and crufty while the very architecture it was designed around was becoming moot since things were shifting …

    tux1968 on Hacker News · 2021-03
    In Guide: Full Wayland Setup for Linux

  • Here you are: [VIDEO] It’s a great presentation by one of the guys behind wayland, who worked on X a lot before. Basically, X has a fundamentally misaligned abstraction of the underlying hardware - which is expected based on its age. When used with a …

    kaba0 on Hacker News · 2021-03
    In Guide: Full Wayland Setup for Linux

  • Please have a look at an X maintainers very own presentation: [VIDEO] Wayland is not a middle man as it is the compositor itself as well - it does the minimal amount of work necessary to compose the desktop. X on the other hand just …

    kaba0 on Hacker News · 2022-02
    In Less Than 10% of Firefox Users on Linux Are Running Wayland

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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