In this video, you will learn about the Linux Graphical Stack.
So the Graphical Stack is all the components that make that you can work in a graphical
environment.
And on current Linux distributions, Wayland is used as the display protocol.
It's the heart of the Graphical Stack and it defines a set of rules on how applications
communicate.
On top of that, the Wayland Compositor implements the Wayland protocol.
It communicates with the graphical hardware and it receives application windows and draws
them on the screen.
Mutter is the part that is the default compositor in GNOME.
And KWin is the default in the KDE desktop environment.
The desktop environment runs on top of Wayland to provide the user graphical interface.
And the two common desktop environments are GNOME and KDE.
And they include all graphical components and even some graphical applications.
Then there is a thing called the Graphical Display Server.
To show graphical application output, a display server is needed.
And X11 is the old monolithic display server.
It was introduced in 1984 and has been used until the early 2020s.
Wayland is the new standard.
It's a protocol that defines how applications talk to the compositor and it replaces X11.
In Wayland, the compositor is used as the additional component that arranges that applications
can draw screens.
And a compositor as such is the display server, which in X11 was implemented by a window manager.
Common compositors in Wayland are Mutter and KWin, as already discussed.
Wayland has no native network access and that changes things quite a bit.
Because on X11, you could have a remote X client drawing screens on a local X server.
That's not the case in Wayland.
So no remote graphical client that draws screens on a local Wayland server, which is something
which from a security perspective is not bad at all.
Now Wayland is offering a couple of advantages.
In many graphical applications, the X server has become the bottleneck in performance.
And Wayland is using a much simpler architecture.
And for that reason, it's also much faster.
Wayland is more secure and runs applications in more isolation.
But native Wayland applications need to be used.
And that means that your classical X applications don't work anymore, unless you do something
about the compatibility.
Now X11 has some legacy code that must stay for backward compatibility reasons.
And in Wayland, you get rid of that all at once.
But one major disadvantage, and that is that your classical X11 applications don't work
anymore, which is also why you won't find them in the distribution repositories anymore.