Wayland

Related articles
Graphics processing unit
KMS
Xorg
Screen capture#Wayland
Wayland
is a
display server
protocol. It has been widely established as the successor of the
X Window System
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
. 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 compatibility with native X11 applications to run them seamlessly,
Xwayland
can be used, which provides an X Server in Wayland.
Requirements
Wayland is just the protocol, unlike
Xorg
it does not have a common "display server" to install. To use it, you only need a compatible display driver (this section) and a compositor (next section) or
desktop environment
(e.g.
GNOME
or
Plasma
) that implements the Wayland protocol. Most Wayland compositors only work on systems using
Kernel mode setting
.
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
* NVIDIA ≥ 495 supports both EGLStreams and GBM.
[5]
Since NVIDIA introduced GBM support, many compositors (including Mutter and KWin) started using it by default for NVIDIA ≥ 495. GBM is generally considered better with wider support, and EGLStreams only had support because NVIDIA did not provide any alternative way to use their GPUs under Wayland with their proprietary drivers. Furthermore, KWin
dropped support for EGLStreams
after GBM was introduced into NVIDIA.
If you use a popular desktop environment/compositor and a GPU still supported by NVIDIA, you are most likely already using GBM backend. To check, run
journalctl -b 0 --grep "renderer for"
. To force GBM as a backend, set the following
environment variables
:
GBM_BACKEND=nvidia-drm
__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia
Compositors
See
Window manager#Types
for the difference between
Stacking
,
Tiling
and
Dynamic
.
Stacking
hikari
— wlroots-based compositor inspired by
cwm
which is actively developed on FreeBSD but also supports Linux.
http://hikari.acmelabs.space/
||
hikari
AUR
KDE
KWin
— See
KDE#Starting Plasma
.
https://userbase.kde.org/KWin
||
kwin
labwc
— wlroots-based compositor inspired by Openbox.
https://github.com/labwc/labwc
||
labwc
Mutter
— See
GNOME#Starting
.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter
||
mutter
waybox
— a *box-style (minimalist) Wayland compositor modeled largely on Openbox
https://github.com/wizbright/waybox
||
waybox
AUR
wayfire
— 3D compositor inspired by
Compiz
and based on wlroots.
https://wayfire.org/
||
wayfire
Weston
— Wayland compositor designed for correctness, reliability, predictability, and performance.
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://gitlab.com/Rubo/wio
||
wio-wl
AUR
wlmaker
— wlroots-based compositor that's inspired by
Window Maker
.
https://phkaeser.github.io/wlmaker/
||
wlmaker
AUR
woodland
— a minimal lightweight wlroots-based window-stacking compositor for Wayland, inspired by Wayfire and TinyWl.
https://github.com/DiogenesN/woodland
||
woodland
AUR
Tiling
Cagebreak
— Based on cage, inspired by
ratpoison
.
https://github.com/project-repo/cagebreak
||
cagebreak
AUR
jay
— A Wayland compositor, written in Rust. Appearance is based on the default i3 look and feel. Jay can be configured via a declarative TOML file or a shared library that gets injected into the compositor.
https://github.com/mahkoh/jay
||
jay
AUR
IonWL
— Manual tiling compositor. Follows Ion3's design with a comprehensive Python API.
https://codeberg.org/ideasman42/IonWL
||
ionwl-git
AUR
miracle-wm
— A Wayland compositor based on Mir in the style of i3 and sway with the intention to be flashier and more feature-rich than either, like swayfx.
https://github.com/miracle-wm-org/miracle-wm
||
miracle-wm
AUR
niri
— A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.
https://github.com/niri-wm/niri
||
niri
Qtile
— A full-featured, hackable tiling window manager and Wayland compositor written and configured in Python.
https://github.com/qtile/qtile
||
qtile
Sway
—
i3
-compatible Wayland compositor based on wlroots.
https://github.com/swaywm/sway
||
sway
SwayFx
—
Sway
, but with eye candy!
https://github.com/WillPower3309/swayfx
||
swayfx
AUR
Velox
— Simple window manager based on swc, inspired by dwm and
xmonad
.
https://github.com/michaelforney/velox
||
velox-git
AUR
Dynamic
COSMIC
Compositor
— Compositor for the COSMIC desktop environment.
https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp
||
cosmic-comp
cwc
—
awesome
-like Wayland compositor based on wlroots.
https://cudiph.github.io/cwc/apidoc/
||
cwc
AUR
MangoWM
— A
dwl
-based compositor with a standard configuration file, an optional scrolling layout and support for eye candy.
https://github.com/mangowm/mango
||
mangowm
AUR
dwl
—
dwm
-like Wayland compositor based on wlroots.
https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl
||
dwl
AUR
Hyprland
— A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that does not sacrifice on its looks.
https://hypr.land
||
hyprland
japokwm
— Dynamic Wayland tiling compositor based around creating layouts, based on wlroots.
https://github.com/werererer/japokwm
||
japokwm-git
AUR
River Classic
— Dynamic tiling Wayland compositor inspired by dwm and
bspwm
.
https://codeberg.org/river/river-classic
||
river-classic
pinnacle-comp
— A Smithay-based Wayland compositor, inspired by AwesomeWM and configured in Lua or Rust
https://github.com/pinnacle-comp/pinnacle
||
pinnacle-comp
AUR
Other
Cage
— Displays a single fullscreen application like a kiosk.
https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/
||
cage
GNOME Kiosk
— Mutter based compositor that provides an environment suitable for fixed purpose, or single application deployments like wall displays and point-of-sale systems.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-kiosk
||
gnome-kiosk
AUR
phoc
— A tiny wlroots-based compositor for mobile devices.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phoc
||
phoc
Wayback
— X11 compatibility layer which allows for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components. It is experimental, in the early stage of development.
https://wayback.freedesktop.org/
||
wayback-x11
AUR
River
—  A non-monolithic Wayland compositor. Unlike other Wayland compositors, it does not combine the compositor and window manager into one program. Instead, users can choose any window manager implementing the river-window-management-v1 protocol.
https://isaacfreund.com/software/river/
||
river
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.
Name
Runs on
Description
emptty
tty
Simple CLI Display Manager on TTY.
GDM
Wayland
GNOME
display manager.
greetd
Wayland/Xorg/tty
See
Greetd#Greeters
.
Minimal and flexible login daemon.
lemurs
tty
TUI display manager written in Rust.
lidm
AUR
tty
A fully colorful customizable TUI display manager made in C.
LightDM
Xorg
[6]
Cross-desktop display manager.
ly
tty
TUI display manager written in Zig
SDDM
Wayland/Xorg
QML-based display manager.
tbsm
AUR
tty
Simple CLI session launcher written in pure bash.
uwsm
tty
Session and XDG autostart manager for standalone compositors.
Provides a TUI menu, but can also be used with other display managers.
Xwayland
Xwayland(1)
is an X server that runs under Wayland and provides compatibility for native
X11
applications that are yet to provide Wayland support. To use it,
install
the
xorg-xwayland
package.
Xwayland is started via a compositor, so you should check the documentation for your chosen compositor for Xwayland compatibility and instructions on how to start Xwayland.
By default, Xwayland runs its X server in
rootless
mode.
Note
Security: Xwayland is an X server, so it does not have the security features of Wayland.
Performance: Xwayland has a
nearly identical performance
to that of X11, in most cases.
Compatibility: Xwayland is not fully backward compatible with X11. Some applications may not work properly under Xwayland.
Wayback
Wayback
(
wayback-x11
AUR
,
wayback-x11-git
AUR
), is an X11 compatibility layer which allows for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components. It is intended to eventually replace the classic X.Org server, thus reducing maintenance burden of X11 applications.
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.
Enabling
DRM KMS
is required. There may be additional information in the
official documentation
regarding your display manager (e.g.
GDM
).
Detect Xwayland applications
To determine whether an application is running via Xwayland, you can use
xeyes
from
xorg-xeyes
: the eyes are moving, when moving the mouse pointer over an application window.
Another option is to run
xwininfo
(from
xorg-xwininfo
) in a terminal window: when hovering over an Xwayland window the mouse pointer will turn into a + sign. If you click the window it will display some information and end, but it will not do anything with native Wayland windows.You can use
Ctrl+C
to end it.
You can also use
xlsclients
(from the
xorg-xlsclients
package). To list all applications running via Xwayland, run
xlsclients -l
.
Alternatively, you can start
extramaus
AUR
and move your mouse pointer over the window of an application. If the red mouse moves, the application is running via Xwayland.
Tip
For KDE Plasma, you can also inspect windows with
KDE#KWin debug console
.
GUI libraries
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
.
For theming issues, see
GTK#Wayland backend
.
Qt
To enable Wayland support in
Qt
5, install the
qt5-wayland
package. Qt 5 applications will then run under Wayland on a Wayland session.
While it should not be necessary, to explicitly run a Qt application with the Wayland plugin
[7]
, 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.
QT_QPA_PLATFORM="wayland;xcb"
allows Qt to use the xcb (X11) plugin instead if Wayland is not available.
[8]
Due to the
Incorrect sizing and bad text rendering with WebEngine using fractional scaling on Wayland
Qt WebEngine bug, applications using Qt WebEngine, for example
Calibre
, may display jagged fonts. A workaround is launching the application with
QT_SCALE_FACTOR_ROUNDING_POLICY=RoundPreferFloor
.
This prevents the application window being fractional scaled.
Clutter
The Clutter toolkit has a Wayland backend that allows it to run as a Wayland client. The backend is enabled in the
clutter
AUR
package.
To run a Clutter application on Wayland, set
CLUTTER_BACKEND=wayland
.
SDL
In
SDL3
, Wayland is used by default if the compositor supports the
fifo-v1 protocol
.
[9]
Otherwise, X11 and Wayland are tried in order. Either can be forced either using the
SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=x11
or
SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=wayland
environment variables respectively (or, with a lower precedence, the SDL2 environment variable below)
[10]
.
sdl2-compat
follows the SDL3 rules above, barring
application-specific exceptions
. As for SDL2 proper (e.g.
sdl2
AUR
), set
SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland
.
SDL_VIDEODRIVER="wayland,x11"
allows SDL2 to use the x11 video driver instead if Wayland is not available.
[11]
. You may also want to install
libdecor
to enable window decorations (for example, on GNOME).
Refer to the
official documentation
for more details.
GLFW
The
glfw
package has support for Wayland, and uses the Wayland backend if the
environment variable
XDG_SESSION_TYPE
is set to
wayland
and the application developer has not set a specific desired backend.
See the
source code
for more information.
GLEW
If the
glew-wayland-git
AUR
package does not work with the needed GLEW-based applications, the option is to use
glew
with Xwayland. See
FS#62713
.
EFL
Enlightenment has
complete Wayland support
.
To run an EFL-based application on Wayland, set
ELM_DISPLAY=wl
.
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 environment variables:
Prior to version 0.29.2, set
WINIT_UNIX_BACKEND=x11
For version 0.29.2 and higher, unset
WAYLAND_DISPLAY
, which forces a fallback to X using the
DISPLAY
variable.
[12]
Electron
Note
In
Plasma
, some Electron applications can use the wrong icon (default Wayland one) for the window, while using the correct icon for the taskbar. To fix that, you can create a special application/window rule, forcing the desktop file name on such applications.
Wayland support can be activated using command line flags, or an environment variable.
Command line flags
Note
Some packages do not forward flags to Electron, and thus will need the application developer to implement a solution.
See
Chromium#Native Wayland support
to command-line flags needed to work on Wayland. Note that the command-line flag
--ozone-platform-hint=auto
does not work since Electron 38.
You can pass these flags manually, persist them in an
Electron configuration file
, or
override the .desktop file at ~/.local/share/applications
of an application by adding the flags to the end of the
Exec=
line.
The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.
Reason:
Old version of Electron needs
--enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer
But what version is it enable by default? Also default behavior of Electron vendored by non-free software would be wrong. (Discuss in
Talk:Wayland
)
Electron enable WebRTC screen capture over PipeWire by default. The capture is based on
xdg-desktop-portal
.
A case of missing top bars can be solved by using:
--enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations
. This will typically be necessary under
GNOME
(supported since
electron17
).
Environment variable
Applications using Electron between versions 28 and 37 can use the
environment variable
ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT
set to
auto
or
wayland
.
This takes lower priority than the command line flags.
Java
The open source implementation of the
Java
platform OpenJDK does not yet have native support for Wayland.
The
Wakefield
project is working on a component named
WLToolkit
to add Wayland support to OpenJDK.
Until WLToolkit lands in stable OpenJDK, you have several options:
Use XWayland. However, XWayland does not have full feature parity with Wayland, and it may lead to nothing displaying with certain applications such as
netbeans
and
oracle-datamodeler
AUR
.
See
Debian:Wayland#Java Programs (supported since OpenJDK 16?)
:
Starting with OpenJDK 16, the JRE can dynamically load GTK3 (which has Wayland support), it appears this might be supported according to this
discussion
.
The
_JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING
environment variable
can be set to "1" to fix misbehavior where the application starts with a blank screen.
Use Wakefield’s
jdk25-wayland
work-in-progress branch. Some programs such as the
JetBrains IDEs
do just that so they support Wayland out of the box.
For other Java programs, you need you bring your own Wakefield build, e.g.
jdk-openjdk-wakefield
AUR
. To use it, point
JAVA_HOME
to
/usr/lib/jvm/java-25-openjdk-wakefield
and run your program with the
-Dawt.toolkit.name=WLToolkit
option.
Tips and tricks
Automation
ydotool
(
ydotool
) - Generic command-line automation tool (not limited to wayland).
Enable/start
the
ydotool.service
user unit
. See
ydotoold(8)
,
ydotool(1)
.
wtype
(
wtype
) - xdotool type for wayland. See
wtype(1)
.
keyboard
- Python library that works on Windows and Linux with experimental OS X support.  Also see the
mouse
library.
wlrctl
(
wlrctl
AUR
) - A command line utility for miscellaneous wlroots extensions (supports the foreign-toplevel-management, virtual-keyboard, virtual-pointer)
Remap keyboard or mouse keys
See
Input remap utilities
.
Screencast
See
Screen capture#Screencasting
and
Screen capture#Screencast Wayland windows with X11 applications
.
Persist clipboard after app close
This article or section is a candidate for merging with
Clipboard
.
Notes:
This is a standard behavior even on Xorg. There are many other clipboard managers. (Discuss in
Talk:Wayland
)
Due to Wayland's design philosophy, clipboard data is stored in the memory of the source client. When the client closes, the clipboard data is lost. You can solve this using
wl-clip-persist
, which runs in the background to reads the clipboard data and stores it in its own memory, separate from the source client.
Autostart wayland compositor as systemd service
Note
Universal Wayland Session Manager
automatically generates systemd units for your compositors, moreover it helps you to
integrate graphical applications with systemd
.
If you do not want to use a display manager or a shell, you can autostart your Wayland compositor with a
systemd
service. Adjust the
ExecStart
line with the compositor you want to use. Here is an example for
KDE Plasma
:
/etc/systemd/system/wayland-compositor.service
[Unit]
After=graphical.target systemd-user-sessions.service modprobe@drm.service
Conflicts=getty@tty1.service

[Service]
User=
username
WorkingDirectory=~

PAMName=login
TTYPath=/dev/tty1
UnsetEnvironment=TERM

StandardOutput=journal
ExecStart=/usr/lib/plasma-dbus-run-session-if-needed /usr/bin/startplasma-wayland

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target
Use another renderer for wlroots based compositor
You can use another
wlroots renderer
such as vulkan by specifying the
WLR_RENDERER
environment variable for wlroots based compositor. The list of available ones is on the
wlroots documentation
.
Specifying the primary graphics cards on wlroot based compositor
If your device has
Hybrid graphics
, then you can use
WLR_DRM_DEVICES
environment variable to specifies primary graphics cards according to the
wlroots documentation
Example:
WLR_DRM_DEVICES='/dev/dri/card1:/dev/dri/card2:/dev/dri/card0'
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.
Remote display
wlroots0.18
and
wlroots0.19
(used by
sway
) offers a VNC backend via
wayvnc
since version 0.10. RDP backend has been removed
[13]
.
mutter
has now remote desktop enabled at compile time, see
[14]
and
gnome-remote-desktop
for details.
krfb
offers a VNC server for
kwin
.
krfb-virtualmonitor
can be used to set up another device as an extra monitor.
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
is a transparent proxy for Wayland applications, with a wrapper command to run over
SSH
Here is an example for launching a remote KDE kcalc under Plasma:
$ waypipe ssh example.local env QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=KDE dbus-launch kcalc
Input grabbing in games, remote desktop and virtual machine 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:
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
Kwin
KDE#X11 shortcuts conflict on Wayland
Keyboard shortcuts inhibit
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
.
Avoid loading NVIDIA modules
Add
__EGL_VENDOR_LIBRARY_FILENAMES=/usr/share/glvnd/egl_vendor.d/50_mesa.json
as
environment variable
before launching a Wayland compositor like
sway
.
Magnifying/surface scaling
Screen magnifying is not solved yet, a pull request was merged mid-2022
providing the protocol wp-surface-scale
.
Wayland lag/stuttering since kernel 6.11.2 (AMD)
Until this issue is patched in future kernel releases, a workaround is to add
amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x400
to the cmdline.
See:
https://community.frame.work/t/wayland-lag-stuttering-since-kernel-6-11-2/59422
Games / applications suspended when changing a virtual desktop
This article or section needs expansion.
Reason:
Add more information and reference to upstream documentation here if found: the feature is elusive and seems poorly documented. (Discuss in
Talk:Wayland
)
When changing workspace or using
Alt+Tab
, games (and possibly other graphical applications) are suspended, put in some weird state, and they (partially) stop. This includes VRR applications and applications with VSync turned on but is not limited to them only. Symptoms include things like audio dropping (partially) out, game not progressing, ping times rising high or network dropping out, but only if the game window is not in focus. This may only affect applications with VSync on.
It is possible some games can work around this issue by changing to a window, but some do not. This is extremely annoying in more complex games which require heavy usage of web browsing, documentation and 3rd party tools or if the gameplay is interrupted for some reason.
Possible workaround include setting environment variables
MESA_VK_WSI_PRESENT_MODE=immediate
and/or
vk_xwayland_wait_ready=false
, but setting these will break any VSync or VRR implementations.
See also
Wayland documentation online
Official repository
Fedora:How to debug Wayland problems
We are Wayland now!
- An updated version of "Are we Wayland yet?"
Awesome Wayland projects
Cursor themes
Arch Linux forum discussion
i3 Migration Guide - Common X11 apps used on i3 with Wayland alternatives
Wayland Explorer - A better way to read Wayland documentation
How can I tell if an application is using XWayland