Wayland Wayland is a replacement for the X11 window system protocol and architecture with the aim to be easier to develop, extend, and maintain. Wayland is the language (protocol) that applications can use to talk to a display server in order to make themselves visible and get input from the user (a person). A Wayland server is called a ...
Wayland Architecture A good way to understand the wayland architecture and how it is different from X is to follow an event from the input device to the point where the change it affects appears on screen. This is where we are now with X: The kernel gets an event from an input device and sends it to X through the evdev input driver. The kernel does all the hard work here by driving the device ...
How can I replace Wayland's Window Manager? The Wayland architecture integrates the display server, window manager and compositor into one process. You can think of Wayland as a toolkit for creating clients and compositors. It is not a specific single compositor or window manager. If you want a different window manager, you can write a new one.
Architecture A Wayland compositor usually takes care of launching Xwayland. Xwayland works in cooperation with a Wayland compositor as follows: Xwayland architecture diagram An X11 application connects to Xwayland just like it would connect to any X server. Xwayland processes all the X11 requests.
The Wayland protocol lets the compositor send the input events directly to the clients and lets the client send the damage event directly to the compositor: Wayland architecture diagram The kernel gets an event and sends it to the compositor. This is similar to the X case, which is great, since we get to reuse all the input drivers in the kernel.