Wayland

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Wayland is a display server protocol. It is aimed to become the successor of the X Window System. You can find a comparison between Wayland and Xorg on Wikipedia.

Display servers using the Wayland protocol are called compositors because they also act as compositing window managers. Below you can find a list of Wayland compositors.

For backwards compatibility to seamlessly run legacy X11 applications, XWayland can be used, which provides an X Server in Wayland.

Requirements

Most Wayland compositors only work on systems using Kernel mode setting. Wayland by itself does not provide a graphical environment; for this you also need a compositor (see the following section), or a desktop environment that includes a compositor (e.g. GNOME or KDE).

For the GPU driver and Wayland compositor to be compatible they must support the same buffer API. There are two main APIs: GBM and EGLStreams.

Buffer API	GPU driver support	Wayland compositor support
GBM	All except NVIDIA < 495*	All
EGLStreams	NVIDIA	GNOME, KDE, Weston (with a third-party patch)

*: Nvidia >= 495 supports both EGLStreams and GBM.[1]

Compositors

See Window manager#Types for the difference between Tiling and Stacking.

Tiling

Cagebreak — Based on cage, inspired by ratpoison.

https://github.com/project-repo/cagebreak || cagebreak^AUR cagebreak-bin^AUR

Cardboard — Scrolling compositor, inspired by PaperWM, based on wlroots.

https://gitlab.com/cardboardwm/cardboard || cardboard-git^AUR

dwl — dwm-like Wayland compositor based on wlroots.

https://github.com/djpohly/dwl || dwl^AUR

japokwm — Dynamic Wayland tiling compositor based around creating layouts, based on wlroots.

https://github.com/werererer/japokwm || japokwm-git^AUR

Qtile — A full-featured, hackable tiling window manager and Wayland compositor written and configured in Python.

https://github.com/qtile/qtile || qtile

river — Dynamic tiling Wayland compositor inspired by dwm and bspwm.

https://github.com/ifreund/river || river^AUR river-git^AUR

Sway — i3-compatible Wayland compositor based on wlroots.

https://github.com/swaywm/sway || sway

Velox — Simple window manager based on swc, inspired by dwm and xmonad.

https://github.com/michaelforney/velox || velox-git^AUR

Vivarium — A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor using wlroots, with desktop semantics inspired by xmonad.

https://github.com/inclement/vivarium || vivarium-git^AUR

waymonad — Wayland compositor inspired by xmonad written in Haskell.

https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad || not packaged? search in AUR

newm — Wayland compositor written with laptops and touchpads in mind.

https://github.com/jbuchermn/newm/ || newm-git^AUR

Stacking

Enlightenment — See Enlightenment#Manually. More Info: [2] [3]

https://www.enlightenment.org/ || enlightenment

Greenfield — Runs in a web browser and can display remote applications.

https://greenfield.app/ || not packaged? search in AUR

Grefsen — Qt/Wayland compositor providing a minimal desktop environment.

https://github.com/ec1oud/grefsen || not packaged? search in AUR

hikari — wlroots-based compositor inspired by cwm which is actively developed on FreeBSD but also supports Linux.

https://hikari.acmelabs.space/ || hikari^AUR

KDE KWin — See KDE#Starting Plasma.

https://userbase.kde.org/KWin || kwin

Liri Shell — Part of Liri, built using QtQuick and QtCompositor as a compositor for Wayland.

https://github.com/lirios/shell || liri-shell-git^AUR

labwc — wlroots-based compositor inspired by Openbox.

https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc || labwc-git^AUR

Mutter — See GNOME#Starting.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter || mutter

wayfire — 3D compositor inspired by Compiz and based on wlroots.

https://wayfire.org/ || wayfire^AUR

Weston — reference implementation of a Wayland compositor.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston || weston

wio — wlroots-based compositor that aims to replicate the look and feel of Plan 9's Rio desktop.

https://wio-project.org/ || not packaged? search in AUR

Other

Cage — Displays a single fullscreen application like a kiosk.

https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/ || cage

Maze Compositor — Renders windows in a 3D maze using Qt.

https://github.com/imbavirus/mazecompositor || not packaged? search in AUR

Motorcar — Wayland compositor to explore 3D windowing using virtual reality.

https://github.com/evil0sheep/motorcar || not packaged? search in AUR

Some of the above may support display managers. Check /usr/share/wayland-sessions/compositor.desktop to see how they are started.

Display managers

Display managers listed below support launching Wayland compositors. The "Type" column indicates whether the display manager supports running itself on Wayland or not.

Name	Type	Description
GDM	Runs on Wayland	GNOME display manager.
greetd	Login daemon	Minimal and flexible login daemon.
LightDM	Runs on X11	Cross-desktop display manager.
Ly	Runs in console	TUI display manager written in C
SDDM	Runs on X11	QML-based display manager.
tbsm	Runs in console	Simple CLI session launcher written in pure bash.

GUI libraries

See details on the official website.

GTK

The gtk3 and gtk4 packages have the Wayland backend enabled. GTK will default to the Wayland backend, but it is possible to override it to Xwayland by modifying an environment variable: GDK_BACKEND=x11.

Qt

To enable Wayland support in Qt 5 or 6, install the qt5-wayland or qt6-wayland package, respectively.

To run a Qt application with the Wayland plugin [4], use -platform wayland or QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland environment variable. To force the usage of X11 on a Wayland session, use QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb. This might be necessary for some proprietary applications that do not use the system's implementation of Qt, such as zoom^AUR.

On some compositors, for example sway, Qt applications running natively might have missing functionality. For example, KeepassXC will be unable to minimize to tray. This can be solved by installing qt5ct and setting QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct before running the application.

Clutter

The Clutter toolkit has a Wayland backend that allows it to run as a Wayland client. The backend is enabled in the clutter package.

To run a Clutter application on Wayland, set CLUTTER_BACKEND=wayland.

SDL2

To run a SDL2 application on Wayland, set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland.

Note: Many proprietary games come bundled with old versions of SDL, which do not support Wayland and might break entirely if you set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland. To force the application to run with XWayland, set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=x11.

GLFW

To use GLFW with the Wayland backend, install the glfw-wayland package (instead of glfw-x11).

GLEW

The glew-wayland^AUR package currently still does not work with a lot of GLEW-based applications, so the only option is to use glew with Xwayland. See FS#62713.

EFL

EFL has complete Wayland support. To run a EFL application on Wayland, see Wayland project page.

winit

Winit is a window handling library in Rust. It will default to the Wayland backend, but it is possible to override it to Xwayland by modifying an environment variable: WINIT_UNIX_BACKEND=x11.

Electron

To use electron-based applications natively under Wayland, create or edit the file ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/electron-flags.conf to add the following options.

~/.config/electron-flags.conf

--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform
--ozone-platform=wayland

Note that older versions of electron require their own electron-flags.conf file. For example, if you have the electron12 package installed, you may wish to do

$ ln -s electron-flags.conf ~/.config/electron12-flags.conf

from within your ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME} directory (or maintain a separate ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/electron12-flags.conf file if you want different electron versions to use different runtime options).

Tip: Instead of globally overwriting Electron-flags, one may want to modify desktop entries instead.

XWayland

XWayland is an X Server that runs under Wayland. It provides backwards compatibility for legacy X11 applications.

In order to use it, install the xorg-xwayland package.

XWayland is started via a compositor, so you should check for XWayland compatibility and instructions on how to start XWayland, with the compositor of your choice.

Note: Regarding Security: XWayland is an X Server, so it does not have the security features of Wayland!

Nvidia driver

Note: Nvidia drivers prior to version 470 (e.g. nvidia-390xx-dkms^AUR) do not support hardware accelerated XWayland, causing non-Wayland-native applications to suffer from poor performance in Wayland sessions.

Note that enabling DRM KMS is required. Also note additional information in the official documentation regarding your display manager (e.g. GDM).

Tips and tricks

Detect Xwayland applications visually

To determine whether an application is running via Xwayland, you can run extramaus^AUR. Move your mouse pointer over the window of an application. If the red mouse moves, the application is running via Xwayland.

Alternatively, you can use xorg-xeyes and see if the eyes are moving, when moving the mouse pointer over an application window.

Remap keyboard keys

Wayland's security model prevents programs other than the compositor from grabbing raw keyboard input. Some compositors support remapping keys (for example, mutter through gnome-tweaks), but many do not. The programs evremap^AUR, evdevremapkeys-git^AUR, and kbct-git^AUR work around this by grabbing the keyboard before the compositor, and passing modified keyboard input through to it.

Troubleshooting

Color correction

See Backlight#Color correction.

Slow motion, graphical glitches, and crashes

Gnome-shell users may experience display issues when they switch to Wayland from X. One of the root cause might be the CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling set by yourself for Xorg-based gnome-shell. Just try to remove it from /etc/environment or other rc files to see if everything goes back to normal.

Cannot open display: :0 with Electron-based applications

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: Why does it break Electron applications? This needs some links to relevant issues (Discuss in Talk:Wayland)

Make sure you have not set GDK_BACKEND=wayland. Setting it globally will break Electron applications.

Remote display

(20200206) wlroots (used by sway) offers a VNC backend via wayvnc since version 0.10. RDP backend has been removed [5].
(20180401) mutter has now remote desktop enabled at compile time, see [6] and gnome-remote-desktop for details.
There was a merge of FreeRDP into Weston in 2013, enabled via a compile flag. The weston package has it enabled since version 6.0.0.
waypipe^AUR (or waypipe-git^AUR) is a transparent proxy for Wayland applications, with a wrapper command to run over SSH

Input grabbing in games, remote desktop and VM windows

In contrast to Xorg, Wayland does not allow exclusive input device grabbing, also known as active or explicit grab (e.g. keyboard, mouse), instead, it depends on the Wayland compositor to pass keyboard shortcuts and confine the pointer device to the application window.

This change in input grabbing breaks current applications' behavior, meaning:

Hotkey combinations and modifiers will be caught by the compositor and will not be sent to remote desktop and virtual machine windows.
The mouse pointer will not be restricted to the application's window which might cause a parallax effect where the location of the mouse pointer inside the window of the virtual machine or remote desktop is displaced from the host's mouse pointer.

Wayland solves this by adding protocol extensions for Wayland and XWayland. Support for these extensions is needed to be added to the Wayland compositors. In the case of native Wayland clients, the used widget toolkits (e.g GTK, Qt) needs to support these extensions or the applications themselves if no widget toolkit is being used. In the case of Xorg applications, no changes in the applications or widget toolkits are needed as the XWayland support is enough.

These extensions are already included in wayland-protocols, and supported by xorg-xwayland.

The related extensions are:

Supporting Wayland compositors:

Mutter, GNOME's compositor since release 3.28
wlroots supports relative-pointer and pointer-constraints

Supporting widget toolkits:

GTK since release 3.22.18.

GTK themes not working

See https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/GTK-3-settings-on-Wayland.