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.
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.