Waylandbased

Waylandbased refers to software that uses the Wayland display server protocol as its core mechanism for displaying graphical output, rather than relying on the older X11 system. Wayland provides a simplified model in which a compositor acts as the display server, handling input and composing the final rendered surfaces from clients. In a Waylandbased environment, applications render directly to buffers and the compositor combines those buffers to produce the final image on screen.

Key components and concepts include the Wayland protocol, the compositor, and client libraries such as libwayland-client and libwayland-server. The reference Wayland compositor is Weston, but many other compositors reuse common building blocks, for example wlroots provides components used by several Waylandbased environments. A fundamental distinction is that Wayland-based systems separate display management from the applications in a different way than X11, often enabling simpler code paths, improved security, and lower latency.

Common Waylandbased desktop environments and window managers include GNOME with a Wayland session, KDE Plasma on Wayland, and standalone Wayland compositors like Sway and Wayfire. Many distributions offer Wayland by default or provide a Wayland session alongside an X11 session. Since not all applications natively support Wayland, compatibility layers such as XWayland can run X11 apps within a Wayland session.

The term Waylandbased is used to describe software that supports the Wayland protocol or depends on Wayland for display management. It is distinct from X11-based software, though mixed environments with both Wayland and X11 components are common during the transition period.