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nickelprotoday at 4:45 AM1 replyview on HN

Wayland is far more aligned with the Unix philosophy than Xorg ever was. Xorg was a giant, monolithic, do everything app.

The Unix philosophy is fragmentation into tiny pieces, each doing one thing and hoping everyone else conforms to the same interfaces. Piping commands between processes and hoping for the best. That's exactly how Wayland works, although not in plain text because that would be a step too far even for Wayland.

Some stuff should not follow the Unix philosophy, PID 1 and the compositor are chief examples of things that should not. It is better to have everything centralized for these processes.


Replies

ueckertoday at 5:47 AM

In X you have server, window manager, compositing manager, and clients and all is scoupled by a very flexible protocol. This seems nicely split and aligned with Unix philosophy to me. It also works very well, so I do not think this should be monolithic.