Wayland

GNOME has already defaulted to Wayland, and KDE Plasma also set Wayland as the default in 2024.

Wayland is a next-generation compositor protocol on the Linux desktop that replaces the legacy X11 display protocol and has become the default session environment in mainstream distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu.

Wayland相比传统的X11协议，在安全隔离和图形渲染效率上有显著优势

Wayland is a Linux display server protocol designed to replace X11, which has a history of over 30 years, and isolates inter-application input event access at the protocol level.

Ubuntu has defaulted to Wayland since version 22.04, and Fedora switched to Wayland in version 25.

GTK4 was officially released in late 2020 and, compared to GTK3, introduced a GPU-based rendering pipeline, a more modern input event handling model, and an improved layout system.

Niri is a scrolling tiling window manager based on the Wayland protocol, written in Rust, which began active development in 2023 and adopts an infinitely rightward-scrolling workspace model.

Wayland adopts a more modern compositor model and is superior to X11 in fractional scaling, multi-monitor, and high refresh rate support; X11 has a long history and good compatibility, but its architecture is outdated and has defects such as tearing and difficulty with multi-screen scaling.

NVIDIA proprietary drivers long lagged in Wayland support, and only in recent driver versions have features such as explicit synchronization and hardware cursors been gradually filled in.

Under the Wayland architecture, traditional X11 effect libraries (such as XRender-based shadows) cannot be ported directly and need to be redeveloped for Wayland's rendering pipeline (such as EGL and Vulkan).

Under the Wayland architecture, each window's visual effects (such as shadows, blur, and rounded corners) are usually computed in real time by the compositor through GPU shaders.

Wayland lacks X11's global coordinate system, and certain visual effects that depend on absolute screen positions (such as cross-window shadows) require the compositor to provide additional interfaces.

Wayland makes the compositor the core of the display server, and clients hand rendering results to the compositor for unified compositing through buffer sharing (such as the wl_surface protocol).

Under the Wayland architecture, effects such as window decorations, shadows, and blur are no longer drawn by the clients themselves, but must be implemented through compositor protocols (such as xdg-decoration and layer-shell).

Wayland intentionally limits what other programs can observe and inject, and most AT-SPI-related assumptions are based on X11.

Waydroid is currently the most mainstream solution for running Android applications on Linux phones; it works by running a complete Android image inside a Linux container (LXC) and rendering app output to the Linux desktop by bridging the Wayland display protocol.

In a Wayland environment, traditional X11 tools (such as clipboard scripts based on xdotool) often fail to work properly.

Hyprland is a Wayland-based tiling compositor that handles both window management and screen compositing.

i3 is currently the most popular X11 tiling window manager, and Sway is its spiritual successor under the Wayland compositing protocol, with an API highly compatible with i3.

VoxType captures keystrokes by directly reading /dev/input event devices, bypassing Wayland's input isolation restrictions