What Wayland is

  • Wayland is a display server protocol: a language apps (clients) use to talk to a compositor (the display server). In Wayland, the compositor is the display server.
  • The protocol is minimal by design; lots of features come via extensions (e.g., xdg-shell, layer-shell).

How it differs from X11

  • Direct model: the compositor reads input and renders windows; apps report “what changed” (damage) to it—no middleman X server with forwarding and reparenting. This cuts complexity and can reduce latency/tearing.

wayland.freedesktop.org

  • Security model: by default, one app can’t snoop on another’s input/screen; things like screen-sharing go through portals (user-mediated APIs).

Who ships it

  • Hyprland is a modern, dynamic-tiling Wayland compositor with lots of recent-protocol support.

Reference list

  1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland