Wayland

Wayland is a protocol and accompanying reference implementation for a display server architecture intended as a replacement for the X Window System on Unix-like operating systems. It defines how clients render content and how a compositor combines those renderings on the screen, with the goal of a simpler, more secure, and more efficient stack than X11.

In a Wayland system, the compositor is the display server. It receives input from devices such as keyboards and mice and provides rendering surfaces to clients. Clients render their content to buffers provided by the compositor and notify it of resize and state changes. The compositor schedules the presentation of buffers and composites them into the final image. Communication between clients and the compositor is handled by the Wayland protocol and its associated libraries, libwayland-client and libwayland-server. Typical rendering can use OpenGL, Vulkan, or shared memory buffers; the specifics depend on the compositor and the client.

Wayland is designed to be complemented by protocols such as xdg-shell to manage windows in a desktop-agnostic way. Weston is the official reference compositor, while major desktop environments such as GNOME (Mutter) and KDE Plasma (KWin) provide Wayland-based sessions. The X11 compatibility layer XWayland allows running X11 applications within Wayland sessions. The project began in the early 2010s with contributors from multiple organizations, notably Red Hat, and over time has become the default on many Linux distributions for everyday use, though some software and drivers still use X11 in certain scenarios.