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Wayland

A modern replacement for the X Window System protocol.

Wayland is a display server protocol designed as a simpler, more secure successor to X11. It moves the compositor and window manager into a single privileged process, with clients drawing pixels directly into shared buffers that the compositor composites for display. The result removes a great deal of X11's accumulated complexity around window decorations, input routing, and global hotkeys.

The protocol is small and stable; most of the actual desktop behaviour comes from compositor implementations. wlroots (used by Sway, Hyprland, river, Wayfire) is a popular library for building compositors. GNOME and KDE Plasma each have their own compositor implementations rather than building on wlroots.

Wayland was started in 2008 by Kristian Høgsberg and others, mostly out of frustration with X11's handling of HiDPI, multi-touch, and modern security requirements. After a long transition period, most major Linux distributions now default to Wayland sessions for new installs, with X.Org remaining as a fallback for the cases where Wayland support is incomplete (remote desktops, NVIDIA proprietary driver, some accessibility tools).

Already installed as part of GNOME, KDE Plasma, Sway, etc.
  Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install libwayland-bin
  Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install wayland-devel
  Arch:          sudo pacman -S wayland