In 2017 Wayland was still “the future.” In 2026 it is the present of the Linux desktop: a compositor instead of the X server, less complexity, better HiDPI and security. This post's title stayed in the past — the protocol did not.
What Wayland is
Wayland is a protocol (and a C library) for the compositor to communicate with clients. The compositor can be the environment itself (Mutter, KWin, Sway, COSMIC, Weston) running on KMS/evdev. Clients are native apps, or a rootless X server (XWayland) for software that has not migrated yet.
Weston, the reference implementation, still exists for testing and embedded systems. On actual desktops, the desktop environments’ compositors are in charge — not an “X server” in the middle.
Why X.org could no longer keep up
X11 was born in 1987. In 26 years (when Kristian Høgsberg started Wayland), hardware and UIs had changed: the X server stopped rasterizing “rectangle here, text there” and started receiving finished buffers from the toolkit. In the words of Daniel Stone (talk at linux.conf.au 2013), the protocol became “a terrible communication protocol between the client and the window manager” — with tearing, gray windows before painting, and keyboard grabs that freeze the screensaver.
The X.Org wiki even listed a hypothetical “X12”: what they would do differently if they could redesign the protocol. It was not a serious project; it was a diagnosis. Backward compatibility is X.org policy: four input models, four display models, two rendering models, ~23 active extensions. Every small fix became a disproportionate amount of work.
Wayland itself only exists because X.org cleaned up DRI2, KMS, and Mesa in 2000–2010. Stone: “Wayland would not be possible without the last few years of X.org development.”.
How Wayland is different
It starts from scratch, with the modern role of the display server: the client draws the buffer, the compositor puts it on screen. A pop-up, for example: in X11 the client requests a global keyboard/mouse grab; in Wayland the compositor knows what a popup is and closes it automatically if you click outside — media keys and the screensaver do not stop working along the way.
Old X apps do not need to be rewritten all at once: XWayland is an X server running as a Wayland client. That is how GNOME 50 and Plasma 6.8 still open that GTK2/Qt5 binary nobody is going to port.
What happened from 2017 to 2026
Stone predicted that 2013–2014 would be “a very good year” for GNOME and KDE ports. It took longer, but it happened:
- GNOME — Wayland by default on Fedora since 2016, on Ubuntu since 22.04. GNOME 49/50 (2025–26) removed the X11 session from Shell/Mutter/GDM.
- Ubuntu — 25.10 already shipped without an X11 session; 26.04 LTS is the first Wayland-only GNOME LTS.
- KDE Plasma — Wayland by default since Plasma 6 (2024). Telemetry: more than 95% of 6.6 users were already on Wayland. Plasma 6.7 is the last release with an X11 session; 6.8 (October 2026) removes it. X apps continue through XWayland.
- Fedora / RHEL 10 — Xorg removed from the GNOME session; XWayland remains.
- NVIDIA — the proprietary driver is no longer the classic blocker; on current desktops the Wayland session is the supported path.
Xfce and Cinnamon still carry X11 alongside Wayland. For GNOME/KDE users on a current distro, the title's question has already been answered at login.
How to check (and when to go back to X)
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
# wayland ou x11
In GDM, the session selector (the gear on the login screen) still exists in releases that offer both. In Ubuntu 26.04 GNOME, the Xorg option disappears from the menu. Tools that depend on xdotool, global grabs, or classic X11 forwarding over SSH remain X's niche — or require a portal/PipeWire in place of old-style screen sharing.
References
- wayland.freedesktop.org
- The Real Story Behind Wayland and X (Daniel Stone / Linux Magazine — the source of this post)
- Linux turns 35
X11 did not “die” overnight: it became a compatibility layer. In 2026, the compositor speaks Wayland.