Wayland
A replacement for the X11 window system protocol and architecture
Wayland is a display server protocol and system architecture intended to replace the X11 window system protocol and architecture, with the aim of being easier to develop, extend, and maintain. Applications act as Wayland clients and communicate with a display server called a compositor to become visible and receive user input. There is no single common Wayland server; each graphical environment provides its own compositor implementation, and window management and the end user experience are often tied to that compositor rather than swappable components.
A core part of the architecture is libwayland, an inter-process communication library that translates a protocol definition in XML to a C language API. It encodes and decodes Wayland messages, while implementations live in the various compositor and application toolkit projects. Wayland does not restrict where or how it is used: a compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices or on other operating systems, a nested compositor that is itself an X11 or Wayland application, or a mechanism for application-internal communication, as in some web browsers. The project provides architecture and FAQ documentation, a Wayland book, libwayland documentation, releases, Git repositories, extras such as applications and debugging tools, and development channels including a mailing list, IRC, pending patches, contribution instructions, and a bug tracker.
12 alternatives to Wayland
Ranked by how well each tool replaces Wayland: shared features, audience, price and popularity.
Windows and macOS alternative designed to make your computer faster and more powerful.
Covers 5 of 6 key features and has a free plan.
Free planOpen source53 out of 100 matchContact salesOpen Source Serverless Cloud Platform
Covers 4 of 6 key features and has a free plan.
Free planOpen source53 out of 100 matchContact salesAn open platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web
Covers 4 of 6 key features.
Open source53 out of 100 match—A free operating system built by a volunteer association of individuals, distributed as a
Covers 2 of 6 key features and has a free plan.
Free planOpen source53 out of 100 matchContact salesA flexible, source-based Linux distribution
Covers 3 of 6 key features and has a free plan.
Free planOpen source52 out of 100 matchContact salesA planetary globe 3D engine for building geospatial visualizations
Covers 4 of 6 key features.
Open source52 out of 100 match—A reasonably secure operating system
Covers 3 of 6 key features and has a free plan.
Free planOpen source52 out of 100 matchFree- 52 out of 100 matchContact sales
Open source virtualization for systems that demand isolation and control.
Covers 4 of 6 key features.
Open source52 out of 100 match—Apache + MariaDB + PHP + Perl
Covers 3 of 6 key features and has a free plan.
Free planOpen source52 out of 100 matchContact sales- 51 out of 100 match—
A lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems
Covers 2 of 6 key features.
Open source51 out of 100 match—