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Wayland (protocol)

Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol.[8] A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager.

Original author(s)

Kristian Høgsberg

freedesktop.org et al.

30 September 2008 (2008-09-30)[1]

Wayland: 1.23,[2] Weston: 13.0.3[3] / 30 May 2024 (2024-05-30)

C

Official: Linux
Unofficial: NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD[4]

MIT License[5][6][7]

wayland.freedesktop.org

Wayland is developed by a group of volunteers initially led by Kristian Høgsberg as a free and open-source community-driven project with the aim of replacing the X Window System with a secure[9][10][11][12] and simpler windowing system for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.[8][13] The project's source code is published under the terms of the MIT License, a permissive free software licence.[13][5]


As part of its efforts, the Wayland project also develops a reference implementation of a Wayland compositor called Weston.[8]

A low-level layer or wire protocol that handles the between the two involved processes‍—‌client and compositor‍—‌and the marshalling of the data that they interchange. This layer is message-based and usually implemented using the kernel IPC services, specifically Unix domain sockets in the case of Linux and Unix-like operating systems.[23]: 9 

inter-process communication

A high-level layer built upon it, that handles the information that client and compositor need to exchange to implement the basic features of a . This layer is implemented as "an asynchronous object-oriented protocol".[23]: 9 

window system

Hyprland – a wlroots-based tiling Wayland compositor written in C++. Noteworthy features of Hyprland include dynamic tiling, tabbed windows, a clean and readable C++ code-base, and a custom renderer that provides window animations, rounded corners, and Dual-Kawase Blur on transparent windows.[50]

[49]

 – the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor; Weston implements client side decorations

Weston

claimed full Wayland support since version 0.20[51] but work is currently underway to land a complete Wayland compositor[52]

Enlightenment

has nearly complete Wayland support as of 2021[53]

KWin

maintained a separate branch for the integration of Wayland for GNOME 3.9 (in September 2013);[54] in the 3.13.1 release in 2014, the Wayland branch was merged into the main repository.[55]

Mutter

– a simple example Wayland compositor using Clutter

Clayland

– a tiling Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11.[56] Sway uses wlroots – a modular Wayland implementation that functions as a base for several compositors.[57][58]

Sway

starting with version 25 (released 22 November 2016) uses Wayland for the default GNOME 3.22 desktop session, with X.Org as a fallback if the graphics driver cannot support Wayland.[80] Fedora uses Wayland as the default for KDE desktop session starting with version 34 (released 27 April 2021)

Fedora

shipped with Wayland by default in Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark).[81] However, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS reverted to X.Org by default due to several issues.[82][83] Since Ubuntu 21.04, Wayland is the default again.[84]

Ubuntu

ships Wayland as the default session in version 8, released 7 May 2019.[85]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

ships Wayland as the default session for GNOME since version 10, released 6 July 2019.[86]

Debian

included Wayland on 20 February 2020[87] for the development version, -current, which became version 15.0.

Slackware Linux

ships Wayland as default in the Gnome edition of Manjaro 20.2 (Nibia) (released 22 November 2020).[88]

Manjaro

Mir (software)

X Window System

Official website