Textbook of Linux

Wayland is a modern display protocol designed to replace the venerable X Window System on Linux. Development began in 2008 with the explicit goal of fixing X11's accumulated problems: weaker security, redundant indirection, and a mismatch with modern GPU-accelerated compositing. On Wayland, the compositor and display server are one program (the compositor), reducing complexity and latency.

The architecture is simpler: applications (Wayland clients) talk directly to the compositor, which composites their surfaces and sends them to the display. Each client can only see its own surfaces, giving a much stronger security model by default.

Mainstream compositors include:

• Mutter — GNOME's compositor
• KWin — KDE Plasma's compositor (supports both X11 and Wayland)
• Sway — i3-like tiling, popular with power users
• Hyprland — feature-rich tiling compositor with eye candy
• weston — the reference compositor

Wayland is now the default on Fedora, Ubuntu (recent versions), most GNOME installs, and increasingly KDE. Legacy X11 applications still work inside Wayland sessions via XWayland, a rootless X server that runs as a client to the Wayland compositor. Most users will barely notice the transition; the rough edges (screen recording, accessibility, remote desktop) are steadily being smoothed.