What Is Wayland and What Does It Mean for Linux Users

What Is Wayland?

Wayland is a modern display server protocol designed to replace the aging X11 protocol, aiming to provide a faster, more secure, and more efficient Linux desktop experience. It is the language that applications use to communicate with a display server, enabling them to become visible and interact with users.

How Wayland Works

Wayland operates differently from X11. Instead of a centralized server like Xorg, Wayland uses a compositor, which is the display server in the Wayland architecture. Each graphical environment brings its own compositor implementation, making window management and user experience tied to the specific compositor rather than being swappable components. The core of Wayland is supported by libwayland, an inter-process communication library that translates the protocol definition into a C language API.

Key Features of Wayland

Security: Wayland enhances security by running each graphical application within its own environment, reducing the surface area for potential attacks and unauthorized interference. This design is particularly beneficial in scenarios where users might run untrusted applications.
Performance: Wayland is designed to be more efficient and responsive compared to X11, which can lead to smoother performance and better overall system responsiveness.
Flexibility: Wayland can be used in various configurations, including as a standalone display server or as a nested compositor within another X11 or Wayland environment. This flexibility makes it suitable for a wide range of use cases, from desktops to embedded and mobile systems.

Adoption and Current State

Despite its advantages, Wayland has seen slow adoption among Linux users. According to Mozilla's Telemetry data, less than 10% of Firefox users on Linux are using Wayland, with X11 still dominating at around 93%. This slow uptake is partly due to several factors:

Compatibility Issues: Many popular applications and tools still do not support Wayland or require significant configuration to work correctly. For example, browsers like Chrome and Edge do not default to Wayland, and applications like Spotify and Microsoft Teams require undocumented command line arguments to enable Wayland support.
Desktop Environment Support: Some popular desktop environments, such as XFCE, do not support Wayland, forcing users to choose between their preferred environment and the benefits of Wayland.
Hardware Compatibility: Users with certain hardware, like Nvidia graphics cards, often find that X11 works more reliably than Wayland, which can be a significant barrier to adoption.

Challenges and Limitations

Wayland faces several challenges that hinder its widespread adoption:

Fragmentation: The lack of a standard API for certain functionalities, such as taking screenshots, can lead to fragmentation across different compositors. This makes it difficult to develop applications that work seamlessly across all Wayland environments.
Accessibility and Special Needs: The design of Wayland, while enhancing security, can be hostile to applications requiring low latency, such as video games and certain accessibility tools. This can create significant issues for users with special needs.
Power User Features: Wayland's security-focused design means it does not support certain power user features, such as general-purpose screenshotting and key-rebinding programs, which can be a drawback for advanced users.

Future Prospects

Despite the current challenges, many Linux distributions are moving towards adopting Wayland as their default display protocol. For instance, Fedora has used Wayland as the default for its GNOME desktop since version 25, and Ubuntu has also switched to Wayland by default in recent versions. As more distributions and applications support Wayland, it is likely that the adoption rate will increase, eventually making Wayland the new standard for Linux desktops.