Some positive news for a lot of Linux Mint users who have been complaining about the lack of Wayland support. However, as the blog post listed, it's only going to be experimental in the next major update of Version 21. Still, it'll be good to experience the change.
Also, very clever on the naming schemes used by the Debian and Mint teams for their stable and unstable releases.
I was perfectly confident that the Mint team would get around to Wayland support, when it was good and ready. By the time they get it implemented and set as the default, it'll work great.
I know progress on that has been slow, but I look in on it every now and again and work does seem to be steady in porting their core components.
I'm not sure if they're settled on a compositor yet. There was talk (from the Ubuntu MATE devs) about using Mir, but I haven't heard anything about it in ages, and the Mir suggestion was at a time when wlroots was in a much less mature position. With XFCE, Budgie and Raspberry Pi OS all now going the wlroots direction, it's not inconceivable that MATE will go the same way.
This is important when windows inevitably dies (subscription-based Windows 12?!) and linux mint gets flooded. Better have the "new" thing from the start
Windows won't die what are you talking about? Windows 12 subscriptions are a) just a rumor and b) not for the entire os, just certain features like AI and stuff
I often reread stuff while imagining I'm someone with no knowledge of the topic, the title of this post is a good example of how hilarious things become.
The way for your desktop to communicate with the hardware.
It used to be X11 - A server-client architecture, which meant your desktop was effectively just a client that told the server what to do. The server was the one doing the drawing
Wayland is just a protocol, defining how programs and desktop should communicate with each other - without a middleman that was X11 server. The desktop does the actual drawing here.
Software that displays programs on screen. X11 goes way back and is inefficient. Wayland is the new standard but is seeing regular improvement and updates. I know Fedora have already moved to Wayland. I think Ubuntu have now too. Mint going this direction is good news.
TLDR, software that displays apps on screen. X11 is old and awkward. Wayland is new and better but has been slowly becoming standard.
Wayland is basically the graphics system. Technically, Wayland is just the protocol and a “compositor” that implements Wayland acts as the display server—the thing that draws and manages the application windows on your screen.
Wayland replaces X11 ( the X Window System ), if you know what that is.
it's a good thing to have multiple implementations of compositors. that avoids bad practices or making compositor specific programs that wouldn't work with other compositors.
I don't think there are many "compositors from scratch" are there? GNOME and KDE both have their own, Cinnamon uses a GNOME fork, and almost everything else I can think of is wlroots based. The only other one I can think of which isn't is Mir, which has been around almost as long as Wayland has.