Wayland

lastmod 2026-03-22created 2016-10-068 edits

Wayland is a protocol written in C that lets a display server and its clients communicate. Wayland is open-source software developed by volunteers led by Kristian Høgsberg. Its development goal is to replace the X Window System used on Linux and Unix-like operating systems with a modern, simple window system. The source code is released under the HPND license.

How to turn it off

• How to fix the simplescreenrecorder non-X11 window system problem (disabling Wayland) - Osolgil

Enable WaylandEnable=false in the [daemon] section of the /etc/gdm3/custom.conf file.

Text Input Method

• The current state of Wayland as seen through text input methods. | by Park Joon-Kyu | Medium

Screencast Tools

• wf-recorder
• wl-screenrec

See also

• X11
• Cosmoe - A BeOS class library running on Wayland

Favorite site

• Wikipedia (en) Wayland

Articles

• 48. X-Window and Wayland | Free/open-source software stories told in comics
  • Silicon Graphics, a workstation maker specializing in 3D graphics, proposed the 3D API OpenGL and open-sourced the GLX extension for X-Window.
  • Because GLX was implemented within the existing X-Window architecture, every OpenGL command had to be sent from the OpenGL program to the X server via IPC.
  • In 2004, Novell, while developing Compiz, a window compositor for Linux, developed XGL, which could use OpenGL directly. DRI was used later.
  • As X Window gave up network transparency (Network Transparency) to support GPU acceleration, many features fell out of use.
  • However, the X Window System is split into several processes such as the X server, window manager, and window compositor, all connected by a complex asynchronous protocol, which degrades performance as a result.
  • Since it accesses hardware directly, it has to run with root privileges, which is also a security problem.
  • Kristian Høgsberg, who was working as an X-Window developer at Red Hat, defined a window compositor protocol called Wayland and released an actual implementation called Weston.
  • The event handling, memory management, command scheduling, and mode setting features of the X-Server moved to the Linux Kernel, becoming the evdev, KMS (Kernel Module Setting), and GEM kernel modules.
  • The client does all the painting, and the Window compositor accesses the kernel directly and provides only window management and compositing.
  • Adopted in ChromeOS, GNOME, and KDE Desktop, making desktop implementations possible without X-Window.
• Did Wayland set the Linux desktop back by 10 years? | GeekNews
  • [Original] Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years