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In this video, you will learn about the Linux Graphical Stack.

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So the Graphical Stack is all the components that make that you can work in a graphical

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environment.

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And on current Linux distributions, Wayland is used as a display protocol.

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It's the heart of the Graphical Stack and it defines a set of rules on how applications

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communicate.

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On top of that, the Wayland Compositor implements the Wayland protocol.

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It communicates with the graphical hardware and it receives application windows and draws

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them on the screen.

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Mutter is the part that is the default compositor in GNOME.

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And KWin is the default in the KDE desktop environment.

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The desktop environment runs on top of Wayland to provide the user graphical interface.

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And the two common desktop environments are GNOME and KDE.

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And they include all graphical components and even some graphical applications.

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Then there is a thing called the Graphical Display Server.

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To show graphical application output, a display server is needed.

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And X11 is the old monolithic display server.

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It was introduced in 1984 and has been used until the early 2020s.

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Wayland is a new standard.

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It's a protocol that defines how applications talk to the compositor and it replaces X11.

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In Wayland, the compositor is used as the additional component that arranges that applications

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can draw screens.

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And the compositor as such is the display server, which in X11 was implemented by a

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window manager.

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Common compositors in Wayland are Mutter and KWin, as already discussed.

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Wayland has no native network access and that changes things quite a bit, because on X11

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you could have a remote X client drawing screens on a local X server.

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That's not the case in Wayland.

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So no remote graphical client that draws screens on a local Wayland server, which is something

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which from a security perspective is not bad at all.

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Now Wayland is offering a couple of advantages.

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In many graphical applications, the X server has become the bottleneck in performance.

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And Wayland is using a much simpler architecture.

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And for that reason, it's also much faster.

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Wayland is more secure and runs applications in more isolation.

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But native Wayland applications need to be used.

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And that means that your classical X applications don't work anymore, unless you do something

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about the compatibility.

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Now X11 has some legacy code that must stay for backward compatibility reasons.

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And in Wayland, you get rid of that all at once.

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But one major disadvantage, and that is that your classical X11 applications don't work

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anymore, which is also why you won't find them in the distribution repositories anymore.