A lot of the pressure is due to people transitioning to Mint from Win10 without understanding that they’re moving to an XWS system rather than Wayland. If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.
There is an experimental Wayland for Mint… on the login screen there is an icon in the upper right. Clicking that allows you to select the experimental Wayland version or X11… there’s one other but I forget what it is at the moment. So it is possible to run Mint and Wayland, just not recommended.
Seconding Artyom, Arch-based distros are virtually never a good idea for newbies. I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.
But I’d also wager very few new Linux users would have any idea of what Wayland or X11 even are, let alone why they would pick one over the other. For them, Mint is still ideal.
Very true about the Wayland vs X11 knowledge. I didn’t learn about that until quite a while after startint to use Mint. Even know I don’t really umderstand what it does (something rendering and windows?), it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in day to day use anyways.
Short version of the difference, as I’ve been given the knowledge:
X11/X Windowing System is an older system, and still basically works on the CRT paradigm with HBLANK and VBLANK being sacrosanct and real-time. It’s doing transforms from digital to analog and back to digital in today’s world.
Wayland is built for more modern setups, where unoptimized code and excessive memory capacity are the norm, so it renders the whole frame to the GPU at a time and pushes it out, so there’s no concept of scanlines. It’s all just pixels.
Do I understand it right that when it comes down to it, this is a different implementation of the same thing (rendering)? I assume that this is mostly relevant for software engineers and that the end user only notices some differences in speed, if at all?
Basically yes, as far as I know. But some software only works with one or the other (WayDroid only works with Wayland, Cinnamon DE and Hypnotix use X) due to available features.
A lot of the pressure is due to people transitioning to Mint from Win10 without understanding that they’re moving to an XWS system rather than Wayland. If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.
That’s a terrible recommendation for new users…
If all they want a computer for is Steam, they’re going to get a better experience on Wayland. Cinnamon is built on X.
There is an experimental Wayland for Mint… on the login screen there is an icon in the upper right. Clicking that allows you to select the experimental Wayland version or X11… there’s one other but I forget what it is at the moment. So it is possible to run Mint and Wayland, just not recommended.
Oh, right. I never see the login screen, so I keep forgetting it.
Seconding Artyom, Arch-based distros are virtually never a good idea for newbies. I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.
But I’d also wager very few new Linux users would have any idea of what Wayland or X11 even are, let alone why they would pick one over the other. For them, Mint is still ideal.
Very true about the Wayland vs X11 knowledge. I didn’t learn about that until quite a while after startint to use Mint. Even know I don’t really umderstand what it does (something rendering and windows?), it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in day to day use anyways.
Short version of the difference, as I’ve been given the knowledge:
X11/X Windowing System is an older system, and still basically works on the CRT paradigm with HBLANK and VBLANK being sacrosanct and real-time. It’s doing transforms from digital to analog and back to digital in today’s world.
Wayland is built for more modern setups, where unoptimized code and excessive memory capacity are the norm, so it renders the whole frame to the GPU at a time and pushes it out, so there’s no concept of scanlines. It’s all just pixels.
Do I understand it right that when it comes down to it, this is a different implementation of the same thing (rendering)? I assume that this is mostly relevant for software engineers and that the end user only notices some differences in speed, if at all?
Basically yes, as far as I know. But some software only works with one or the other (WayDroid only works with Wayland, Cinnamon DE and Hypnotix use X) due to available features.