Wayland The wait is over
The trusty X Windows display server has been around since the UNIXes of the ’80s. It came to Linux in the form of X386 (later XFree86) in the ’90s, and the bona fide open source X.org fork took over in 2004. It’s been pushing pixels around Linux users’ screens ever since.
You no longer need to risk blowing up your monitor with manually specified display timings; in fact, you probably don’t need to configure it at all. It’s been extended beyond recognition to cope with new hardware and programming: XAA, GLX, Glamor, UXA and a slew of other obscure codenames and acronyms ensure that all your windows move around smoothly. Plus a bunch of its low-level functionality has been moved into the kernel, in the form of KMS.
The trouble is, is still based on the ideas of 30 years ago; the display primitives it caters to are in many ways more relevant to plotters and printers than today’s displays and GPUs. Using it for modern graphics work (particularly gaming) is often described as trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Besides technical shortcomings, it’s become a spaghetti mess of code over the course of its lengthy existence, to the point where) itself.
