qwesx

Gentoo.
Everything just works and I can configure everything the way I want.

In the vast overwhelming amount of cases tooltips show additional information that you cannot see from clicking on something or provide an explanation to an option that isn’t available without scrounging through a manual. None of those apply here.

In current versions of Firefox you hover your mouse over a non-active tab […] to see (after a small delay) a tooltip containing the web page title.

Uh… what is the point of that? If I am looking for a specific tab then:

• I probably want to switch to the tab that I am looking for, so staying on the current one is not required
• if there are a few tabs from different pages from the same domain the difference might be hard to see on a thumbnail (similar page headings with logos)
• and most importantly: opening the tab is faster than waiting for the delay anyway

This sounds like a “cool” feature that’s looking for an actual problem to solve.

dpkg-reconfigure sysvinit

I don’t remember what I was trying to achieve, but it was a bad idea. I also didn’t (and still don’t) know how to fix the outcome of this, so - since my home was on a separate partition anyway - I just reinstalled Debian since that was much quicker anyway.

That something entirely different than the protocol being biased towards Linux. It’s like complaining that TCP/IP is biased towards Linux because the Linux kernel’s networking module can’t be used in BSD kernels.

A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications: Yes, because the compositor IS the server, window manager AND compositor at the same time.

Maybe not anymore in the future: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6_wayland_robustness/

Wayland is biased towards Linux and breaks BSD

FreeBSD already has working Wayland compositors by the way.

X11 and Wayland are just protocols. These protocols are used to abstract the window drawing from the actual hardware and runtime environment as much as reasonably possible - because nobody wants to maintain 3215 versions of their app for different runtime environments. So in order to be shown on the screen an app needs to implement either the X11 or the Wayland protocol (or both!).

The piece of software that is on the other side depends on whether the app is using X11 or Wayland. For the sake of simplicity let’s assume that the app does only support one of those. If the app supports Wayland then it will try to connect to a Wayland compositor. The compositor implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app. If the app supports X11 then it will try to connect to a X server and take the role of an X client. This is (on Linux, essentially) always X.org*. X.org also implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app.

* Unless you’re running a Wayland compositor, then it will connect to XWayland which passes through the window to your compositor.

Wayland compositors have full control over the apps while the abilities of apps are purposefully restricted.
A window manager is just another regular, boring, old X client connecting to the X server. It doesn’t actually abstract anything. It can move windows because the X11 protocol allows it to, but any other X client could just as well move all other windows around, read all user input to all other windows and even move the mouse around as it pleases.

So, to be specific, there is no mouse pointer bug in Virtualbox while using Wayland. There is a mouse pointer bug affecting specific Wayland compositors, likely because they enforce GPU hardware acceleration that is lacking in either your VM or the Linux kernel because of missing drivers. Try using a different compositor, (re)installing Virtualbox Guest Additions with the correct version on the guest system and/or check whether hardware acceleration is enabled for the VM and has enough video memory.

Thank you for explaining what Wayland really is: a protocol. I see way too many people in forums going “Wayland constantly crashes” or “this doesn’t work with Wayland” but what they actually mean is that their compositor of choice crashes or lacks a feature. There are a few things that Wayland doesn’t support (like multiple-main-window-apps that want to put their children relative to each other (i.e. multi-window Gimp)), but that’s usually not what’s being discussed.

But please allow me to correct you on a few details:

• X is not a server. X.org is the single remaining “big” X server in use which replaced XFree86 a long long time ago. X is commonly available as a shortcut to start the main X server installation though.
• X11 is not “an unmaintainable mess”. X11 isn’t as simple anymore as it used to be, but certainly not in an unmaintainable manner. But writing a new X server from scratch is about as much work as untangling the unmaintainable mess that is X.org

far more efficient than with X11

In theory. The issue is that, at this point in time, the vast majority of software that actually needs this efficiency (read: video games) run on XWayland, which adds a bit of overhead which ultimately causes them to run slightly slower on Wayland compositors compared to X.org. Maybe this will change at some point as devs patch their native games to check for a Wayland compositor by default and the big set of Wayland-support-patches makes its way into wine (and hopefully proton).

X12 actually exists. That said, it never went further than an extremely rough draft and was abandoned at some point, ultimately in favor of Wayland.

So that people can’t easily track how much time is spent on getting round window corners compared to how much time is spent not implementing thumbnails in a file chooser dialog?

18 years, by the way.