Wayland
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 (xorg-server-xwayland) can be used, which provides an X Server in Wayland. XWayland compatibility should be checked in the compositor of your choice.
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 | All |
EGLStreams | NVIDIA | GNOME, KDE, Weston |
Compositors
See Window_manager#Types for the difference between Tiling and Stacking.
Tiling
- Cagebreak — Based on cage, inspired by ratpoison.
- Cardboard — Scrolling compositor, inspired by PaperWM, based on wlroots.
- dwl — dwm-like Wayland compositor based on wlroots.
- river — Dynamic tiling Wayland compositor inspired by dwm and bspwm.
- waymonad — Wayland compositor inspired by xmonad written in Haskell.
Stacking
- Enlightenment — See Enlightenment#Manually. More Info: [1] [2]
- Greenfield — Runs in a web browser and can display remote applications.
- Grefsen — Qt/Wayland compositor providing a minimal desktop environment.
- hikari — wlroots-based compositor inspired by cwm which is actively developed on FreeBSD but also supports Linux.
- KDE KWin — See KDE#Starting Plasma.
- Liri Shell — Part of Liri, built using QtQuick and QtCompositor as a compositor for Wayland.
- labwc — wlroots-based compositor inspired by Openbox.
- Mutter — See GNOME#Starting.
- wayfire — 3D compositor inspired by Compiz and based on wlroots.
- https://wayfire.org/ || wayfireAUR
- Weston — reference implementation of a Wayland compositor.
- wio — wlroots-based compositor that aims to replicate the look and feel of Plan 9's Rio desktop.
Other
- Cage — Displays a single fullscreen application like a kiosk.
- Maze Compositor — Renders windows in a 3D maze using Qt.
- Motorcar — Wayland compositor to explore 3D windowing using virtual reality.
Some of the above may support display managers. Check /usr/share/wayland-sessions/compositor.desktop
to see how they are started.
Display managers
Below listed display managers which supports running Wayland compositors. The Type column indicates whether the display manager supports running 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 3
The gtk3 package has 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 5
To enable Wayland support in Qt 5, install the qt5-wayland package.
To run a Qt 5 application with the Wayland plugin [3], 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 zoomAUR.
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
.
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
To use GLEW with the Wayland backend, install the glew-wayland package (instead of glew).
EFL
EFL has complete Wayland support. To run a EFL application on Wayland, see Wayland project page.
winit
Winit is 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
.
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
Make sure you haven't set GDK_BACKEND=wayland. Setting it globally will break Electron apps.
Remote display
- (20200206) wlroots (used by sway) offers an VNC backend via wayvncAUR since version 0.10. RDP backend has been removed. [4].
- (20180401) mutter has now remote desktop enabled at compile time, see [5] 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-gitAUR 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 won't 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-server-xwayland 1.20.
The related extensions are:
- XWayland keyboard grabbing protocol
- Compositor shortcuts inhibit protocol
- Relative pointer protocol
- Pointer constraints protocol
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.