this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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xorg is a old implementation of x11, which is basically abandon-ware right now. No one is adding feature to it, testing it, or fixing security vulnerabilities. It also lack some common-sense security feature: for example every program can get every input (keyboard and cursor location) without root, so a key logger is trivial to implement in xorg.
Wayland is newer, with more features (reasonable multi-monitor support, one-to-one gestures, etc). But many application framework and hardware have poor support for it, because it is slightly newer (developed on 2008, so not that new any more). Notably, electron and nvidia are typically the worst offender, like everything on linux, but both has come a long way.
I have wayland on my laptop, since one-to-one gesture is a must for me, and I present quite often using that laptop. My desktop is on xorg, since I have a nvidia GPU and use quite a lot of electron app.
AMD GPU + KDE Plasma with Wayland finally gets me close enough to the smoothness of Windows, especially the per-display settings for fractional scaling and high refresh rate were sorely lacking on Linux. It’s not perfect yet (and neither is Windows’ implementation) but it improved the Linux desktop experience a ton!
What's are one-to-one gestures?
It's like scrolling on your phone, where the content on your screen follows exactly your fingers movements. On Wayland you can do the same with a trackpad, like for example when scrolling, switching workspaces or invoking the activities overview. It feels much nicer, more immediate and more natural than on X.org, where gestures are just triggering a shortcut after a set distance.
I would add, even my last Windows machine surface laptop 2 with latest windows 11 don't have this feature. it is so awkward, I just stopped using gesture all together.
So it is pretty great linux has that.