The connected Human Machine Interface (HMI ) peripherals dictate the range of use . These need some kernel-support (e.g. evdev , ALSA , DRI , V4L2 ) some middleware-support (e.g. PulseAudio , Maliit ), but eventually the UI (e.g. GNOME Shell , Plasma Next ) must be tailored to them to enable an ergonomic workflow .
Software can be grouped into Linux kernel , middleware and user application. Ergonomics regarding responsiveness requires the latency/delay of the input-processing-output loop to be below a certain threshold. Linux gaming requires an even lower threshold and VR the lowest.
When employing a windowing system , any user applications runs as a client of the display server (here: Wayland compositor ).
A couple of daemons provide functionality: systemd , PulseAudio , NetworkManager , PackageKit , etc. The user sees and interacts with them solely through some graphical front-ends written in one of the common widget toolkits: (GTK+ , Qt , etc.). Regularly these front-ends are mistaken to be the actual program. This ain't dramatic, but its wrong. The above scheme depicts how it actually works, and one can easily deduce why not only developers and plumbers but also end-users do profit from a well-designed and lean display sever protocol. The same way Uncomplicated Firewall is confused with netfilter .
Android predates Tizen and uses SurfaceFlinger .
DRI and X
DRI and Wayland
OpenGL is the rendering API of choice on Linux
This project started to address the problem of un-maintained articles relating to free and open-source operating systems with a graphical shell based on the Linux kernel .