The Stack Beneath the Skin

Week 2. What a desktop is made of, before you change any of it.

“The desktop” is a committee

A display server, a compositor, a window manager, a bar, a launcher, a terminal, and the apps on top. Each is a separate program that agreed to cooperate.

Who does what

  • display server hands out the screen and the input
  • compositor paints windows, and owns your shadows and gaps
  • window manager decides where windows go
  • bar and launcher are just more clients, drawn on top

X11 and Wayland

Two contracts, not two teams.

  • X11 is old, permissive, endlessly scriptable, which is why the tooling assumes it
  • Wayland is newer, stricter, and folds the compositor and display server together
  • Neither is a moral choice; the rest of your setup lives inside the one you sign

Why the screenshot lies

A photograph cannot tell you which stack produced it. The same look is reachable from either contract, by different means. Know which program you are talking to before a tutorial tells you to “just add this line”.

Name your layers

bar, launcher, appswindow managercompositordisplay server

You cannot theme what you cannot name.

Before next week

Identify the stack on the machine you brought last week. Name every layer, and find the one program you will spend the most time fighting.