Lord GooseLiving the power user life over here
As an experiment, I set up a laptop with what I call Linu (Linux without X).
Just wanted to see how much functionality I could get on a CLI/framebuffer-only system.
I was pretty surprised. It could browse the web (with graphics), manage e-mail, view pdf files, read e-books, listen to music, torrent and watch movies, play some games, multitask…
It wasn’t practical at all, but definitely turned my netbook into a fun toy.
Linu
Brilliant, also works for Wayland systems
I’m pretty sure currently every Wayland system still has X installed, no?
It might be installed, but not used. You can’t have both. But there’s a compatibility layer. Sometimes.
I believe XWayland does, in fact, use X. That’s the way the compatibility layer works - anything that isn’t wayland-native gets ran in an X server, and XWayland then handles the input and display between Wayland and the internal X server.
Oh, interesting. I should really try it out. But I’ve been on the “my machine’s working, and there’s no real incentive to change thing” team for a while now :D
Yeah, the reasons to switch to Wayland are either just to use the newest thing, or niche things like fractional DPI scaling support in GNOME. I started using it for that and decided to stick with it, even though I no longer need that, and so far it’s been fine.
Many people complain about Wayland being a waste of time because of the missing features - I hope it grows to be a full fledged replacement of X, it’s probably not something you should be explicitly switching to if you don’t want to deal with the issues. I like setting things up and learning how stuff works, so it worked out for me.
I can tell you that if you switch, for example, screen sharing will probably be broken in various applications, you might experience some issued with copy/pasting between applications, screenshotting/screen recording software might have issues (in particular, there’s no way for an app to know where its window is on the screen), at least on Plasma some apps/games will pause/stop working when minimized, because they stop rendering and they might have logic tied to that.
So… Yeah, might be fun to try out - you can have both installed at once and choose which you want on the greeter - but might not be good enough as a daily driver for you.