RebeccaBlackOS with Wayland instead of X11

Lev Kropotov, 123RF

Radical Reconstruction

Erik Bärwaldt

The replacement of the X11 windowing system by Wayland is imminent. It is easy to see how far development has progressed by looking at the Debian-based RebeccaBlackOS.

The Wayland network protocol can already look back on a number of years of development. Its multi-year mission: to boldly replace the now 30-year-old X11 display server. Wayland is said not only to be more efficient to maintain than the legacy X Window system because of its simplified structure, but also to rigorously throw obsolete technologies overboard, thus doing justice to the capabilities of modern a graphics stack.

If everything works out well for its main developer Kristian Høgsberg, Wayland will deliver a much improved picture quality compared to the X11 system for the user. Innovative rendering mechanisms and modified graphics memory allocation will help avoid screen flicker or screen tearing when moving image content.

Wayland is currently in active development and is not genuinely suitable for production use. Nonetheless, there are various tweaks that let you use Wayland with various desktop environments. That said, RebeccaBlackOS, a Debian-derivative [1] based on the testing branch, gives users detailed insights into the development of Wayland.

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