Regarding its architecture, the table says about Wayland the following
Single unified Compositor handles everything
While this has been true in practice, this isn’t dictated. For example, very recently, we’re finally seeing the decouplement of the compositor from the window manager. Granted, this is still a very recent development and we don’t know if others will follow suit. But I’m excited to see where this will lead us.
I suppose it depends mostly on what you intend to do.
FWIW, Wine makes you potentially vulnerable to malware that targets M$ otherwise. As such, I prefer sandboxed solutions. This used to be Bottles for me. However, currently, I don’t have any need for it; I play my games through the Heroic flatpak and don’t need Wine outside of that.
what is wayland
Basically, whenever an app has a GUI it wants to display, it communicates that to ‘the system’ with all the necessary details. After which ‘the system’ does the rendering and whatnot. Wayland is a protocol that defines a set of rules on how this interaction should take place. Hence, technically, it is only (the defining) part of the modern solution.
how important is it?
Very. Basically, either it or its ‘predecessor’[1] X11 is involved whenever you want to display/render anything[2] on desktop Linux. As X11 has been abandoned in favor of Wayland, some modern features like HDR or VRR are only found on the latter. On the other hand, I believe Wayland was never meant to offer full feature-parity with X11. Hence, some unsupported edge cases may continue to exist indefinitely. Thankfully, it has come a long way. What remains are some concerns related to accessibility AND the adjustment[3] of the surrounding ecosystem.
The term is used loosely here, because there’s a very big difference between the two. ↩︎
Which, to be clear, happens literally all the time. Unless your display needs don’t go beyond what was already available on MS-DOS*. ↩︎
Like, how only very recently Electron got to become proper Wayland-native. Note that Xwayland is included with Wayland as a compatibility layer whenever something is not Wayland-native yet. ↩︎
Shortlist of traditional distros, ordered roughly in descending order:
Shortlist of Only[5] recommendation for atomic distros:
As for deciding between a traditional or atomic distro, I’d personally suggest to try out Bazzite first. And refer to their documentation whenever something comes up during initial setup. If at any point, you’re not able to get it to work even with the help of its community —[7] be it through their Discord, Discourse or subreddit — then simply pivot to the traditional distros.
Attracts most noobs and is probs the most popular out of these; no-brainer. Lack of proper Wayland support and not offering (!) a (semi-)rolling release model are the only reasons why the others deserve to be on this list. Otherwise this would sweep clean. ↩︎
If you want something slow-moving, but still need/want Wayland. ↩︎
Arch-based distro, but comes with very sane defaults. Recommended if you’re on very new hardware. ↩︎
Relatively bare-bones. Especially compared to all the other distros found on this list. But, if you want a more minimalist approach while preserving excellent defaults, then this is definitely it. ↩︎
Technically, any of uBlue’s distros qualifies. But Bazzite is a lot more popular than the others. Hence you’ll have an easier time finding resources for it. ↩︎
This probs deserves a footnote of its own in which I elaborate, but I got tired. Here, have a flower; 💮. ↩︎
I know using the em dash here makes me look sus AF, but I can assure the reader that no LLMs were used in the creation of this writing. ↩︎
Necessary pre-empt: I’m literally u/pheusie. But I got no clue how I can convince you of that beyond “Trust me bro.” as I’ve changed the password of u/pheusie in hopes of never returning to it; kind of my way of dealing with this unhealthy habit of mine 😅.
Anyhow, without further ado…
Microsoft Surface
Hehe 😅, I hope you’ll not be met with any problems. But, if you’re concerned, consider checking this link out. Perhaps some distros take this into account and install the kernel for you (or at least provide a streamlined way of doing so), but I’m simply unaware of any.
I do prefer free software but I only hate giving corporations more money than I have to. I don’t mind paying extra to shop local, I donate to the fedi instances I use, gog’s preservation fund, Wikipedia, and a few other similar things. If the money is primarily going to the people who are actually doing the work or to the cost of equipment and maintenance then I feel a lot better about paying for something so I’m willing to consider paid software if it’s better and will probably make some kind of donation to any FOSS projects I get software from if it’s free.
That’s great to hear. Unfortunately, I can’t vouch on the effectiveness and reliability of any commercial product used for securing desktop Linux devices.
I’m not worried about keeping up with feature updates or always having the absolute newest version. I want it to be stable and functional so once I have it set up security updates will be the thing I’m most concerned about. I’m fine just setting an alarm and checking for updates every Friday or something like that. Background updates are nice but it’s not a big deal to keep up with it manually if it’s centralized into a repository.
I suppose this should have sealed the deal; i.e. we should have been able to logically arrive at a (set of) distro(s). But…, I’m clearly hesitant because the options aren’t as great as I’d wish. To give you some insight:
So…, you might ask: “What about downstream?” The response would be that I’m unaware of any that are both popular AND known to have a dedicated security team.
Could you be explicit? I think it’s more beneficial that way. Thanks in advance!