Wayland Wayland is the language (protocol) that applications can use to talk to a display server in order to make themselves visible and get input from the user (a person) A Wayland server is called a "compositor" Applications are Wayland clients Wayland also refers to a system architecture
Wayland Architecture - freedesktop. org Wayland Architecture A good way to understand the wayland architecture and how it is different from X is to follow an event from the input device to the point where the change it affects appears on screen This is where we are now with X: The kernel gets an event from an input device and sends it to X through the evdev input driver
Wayland FAQ - freedesktop. org The Wayland architecture integrates the display server, window manager and compositor into one process You can think of Wayland as a toolkit for creating clients and compositors It is not a specific single compositor or window manager
Wayland - freedesktop. org Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a Wayland client itself
Chapter 4. Wayland Protocol and Model of Operation The Wayland protocol is an asynchronous object oriented protocol All requests are method invocations on some object The requests include an object ID that uniquely identifies an object on the server
Chapter 1. Introduction - freedesktop. org Overall, the philosophy of Wayland is to provide clients with a way to manage windows and how their contents is displayed Rendering is left to clients, and system wide memory management interfaces are used to pass buffer handles between clients and the compositing manager
Wayland - freedesktop. org Release News Jun 13, 2025 Version 1 45 of Wayland Protocols was released wayland-protocols-1 45 tar xz - Wayland Protocols 1 45 Release Announcement; June 8, 2025 The RC2 for Wayland 1 24 (version 1 23 92) has been released
Chapter 5. X11 Application Support - freedesktop. org An X11 application connects to Xwayland just like it would connect to any X server Xwayland processes all the X11 requests On the other end, Xwayland is a Wayland client that connects to the Wayland compositor The X11 window manager (XWM) is an integral part of the Wayland compositor
Gestures — libinput 1. 28. 1 documentation - freedesktop. org Rather, any touch point is passed to the caller and any interpretation of gestures is up to the caller or, eventually, the X or Wayland client Interpreting gestures on a touchscreen requires context that libinput does not have, such as the location of windows and other virtual objects on the screen as well as the context of those virtual objects: