Nope. Wayland is a windowing system that aims to replace the more-than-30 year old X Window system. It's something more low level than a desktop.

Ah, thanks. I'd eventually have gotten around to looking it up, but get sidetracked far too easily...

Nice. Well, xwininfo seems to predictably not work inside wayland-rendered windows.

What distro are you on? Perhaps I can find a switch for GTK, but I am pretty sure that its impossible for libsdl on *buntu (Neon is based on Ubuntu). I kinda have zero experience with apt-source and intended to dive just a bit into wayland stuff on this system type.

Nothing complex here. These things manage and accelerate windows on screen.
Xserver is like "gdi" on Windows (by principle, not complexity), accelerates lines and dots - perfect for 1980-1995 hardware.
Wayland is like "dwm" on Windows (since Vista), where "window=texture". It also eats more RAM and VRAM, but rendering is much more efficient for 3d accelerated hardware.

Modern applications ignore the whole Xserver anyway by punching holes directly into the card ("compositing"). Linux started punching earlier, Windows got bitmap-based server instead, hence why Aero required far more VRAM, than Linux Compiz (punching hole is cheaper than doing everything proper in bitmap).

From user standpoint... it hardly plays any role, beside having more (potentially useful) effects, more responsive windows and no tearing. For full-screen games it never mattered, games just punch one big fullscreen window and are done with it.

Thanks for taking the time to explain, but I wasn't suggesting it was complex or anything, or that I didn't understand it. I literally never heard of it, that's all and just hadn't taken the time to google it. I'm familiar with Linux so knew KDE was referencing Linux OSes, but hadn't heard of Wayland, as noted. So that's why my initial thought upon seeing the thread title was similar to Breja's (my mind didn't register the KDE the first time I read the thread title).

No problemo. I actually had to retype it from scratch, because copy-paste is apparently broken between legacy window and wayland window, under motto "security".

Nevertheless, I got into KDE first on Solaris, didnt even use touch Linux back then. What I mean to say is.. its open tech, so much broader. So your car with fancy 3d graphics on front glass hud projector may be running Wayland soon.

i'm on gentoo

you can force GTK3 apps to use the wayland backend by settings the environment variable: GDK_BACKEND=wayland
same thing for SDL2 apps: SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland
(if the wayland backend was enabled at compile time of course :) )

SDL1 does not have a wayland backend
not sure what the current status is for Unity games. iirc they had plans to switch to SDL2 / work on a wayland backend.
But all the games that I have seen they still use X11.

quick test:
Terraria works under wayland
Tales of MajEyal crashes :( (though i am missing the latest version from that)

Thats cool! I am currently split between Manjaro and Gentoo, but .. in Gentoo you can enable "qt" overlay, the 5.9.1 version is not really unstable. Been working on Neon for few months, no issues so far.

Great info, thanks! Just tested Synaptic - gtk3 works in wayland (synaptic), but GTK2 (dia) either ignores the value or refuses to start (brave).

Maybe Xwayland gets better with time, I think its more realistic to expect that than that old proprietary games get patched... I mean, its like the stuff with OSS emulation.


Edit: No, apparently it only works if run in user mode, synaptic refuses to run via sudo, claiming that it can't open display.

"$ sudo GDK_BACKEND=wayland dbus-launch synaptic
No protocol specified

(synaptic:9128): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :1"