The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 2

Very opinionated article really.<p>It starts with unsubstantiated claims that X suffers from &quot;bloat&quot; despite being capable of running on a 486 and dismissing the fact that the average Wayland compositor + necessary infrastructure is much more &quot;bloated&quot; than X ever was.<p>It fails to distinguish between compositing and hardware accelerated blit operations that allow X to display multiple windows without the need for a compositor.<p>It talks about hardware planes but fails to mention that no Wayland compositor so far is capable of using them whereas X is using them for the mouse for a long time (which avoids mouse stuttering on high GPU&#x2F;CPU load).<p>It proclaims that certain protocols are &quot;commonly used&quot; when they are really in a experimental phase or actually not commonly used.<p>I get it. Linux userland graphics is huge a mess right now. Mostly because Wayland caused a huge amount of uncertainty and fragmentation. At least call it out as such and don&#x27;t pretend otherwise.

Am I the only one who finds it ironic that this is Part 2 of an &#x27;in a nutshell&#x27; document?

It&#x27;s crazy reading the back and forth in these comments. It seems each side (pro-X11, pro-Wayland) always gets something wrong about the other. Makes it hard as an outsider to figure out what&#x27;s true.<p>FWIW as a regular user of Linux desktops, fractional dpi scaling is very good on Wayland and sucks on X11. That&#x27;s been the main thing driving me to want to use Wayland.

&gt; On top of the application windows, the compositor draws its own user interface, such as a taskbar where the user can interact with the compositor itself.<p>Isn&#x27;t this exactly what the compositor is no longer guaranteed to provide (in case of Wayland)?

That&#x27;s a pretty informative overview! It&#x27;s funny that CRTC refers to cathode ray tube even for all modern displays.<p><i>&gt; This DRM fbdev emulation acts like a DRM client from user space, but runs entirely within the kernel</i><p>I wish kernel&#x27;s terminal emulation would allow more modern features like true color support and sixels. There is no reason it can&#x27;t work? Though if the plan is to replace it with userspace one like the article suggests, may be it will be easier to use better terminals when switching to tty.