Wayland is a display server which was (at the time of writing) introduced as the default display server in GNOME. It is said that Wayland will eventually replace X11 as the default display server on Linux and many distributions have begun implementation of Wayland. Wayland is a more modern display server and has a smaller code base currently. Wayland is still under development, and there are still applications and behaviours that don’t work as expected, you may find that some applications have not been updated to work properly in Wayland and currently the only way these applications will run is using Xorg instead of Wayland. This includes some legacy system applications and games.

Wayland aktiveras som standard i GNOME-skrivbordet. Man kan välja att köra GNOME i X11 genom att välja alternativet Gnome i xorg i sessionsväljaren på inloggningsskärmen. För närvarande använder KDE fortfarande X11 och även om en plasma-wayland-session finns tillgänglig ansis den inte stabil eller felfri för närvarande.

Ett sätt att avgöra om man kör i Wayland är att kontrollera värdet på variabeln $WAYLAND_DISPLAY. För att göra detta skriv:

If you are not running under Wayland the variable will not contain any values. You can also use loginctl to show you what tpe of session is running:

To determine your session number, simply typing loginctl should provide your session details.

There is also a legacy X11 server provided with Wayland for compatibility purposes. To determine what applications are running in this mode, you can run the following command:

There is also the lg (looking glass) tool in GNOME that will allow you to determine what display server a window is using. To do this, you run the application by typing lg in the run dialog or at the command line, select “Windows” in the upper right corner of the tool, and click on the application name (or open window) you want to know about. If the window is running in wayland it will say “MetaWindowWayland” and if it is running in X11 it will say “MetaWindowX11”.

To find out more about Wayland, please see the following website:

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/

If you need to determine if an issue you are experiencing is related to wayland, see the Fedora wiki at the link below:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_Wayland_problems