Wayland appears to be the future of window systems in the world of Linux, replacing the aging X.Org window system. The Arch Wiki article on X.Org refers to it as "the alternative and successor [of X.Org]" and Canonical even dropped its own Mir display server in favor of Wayland on Ubuntu. So when it became time for me to configure a new laptop in the beginning of January, I decided to do give Wayland a go. Here's what I think of it so far.

What the heck is a window system?

First of all, what the heck is a window system? In short, it's the component that renders graphical windows to your screen and communicates the user's input to the underlying operating system. The X Window System, or just X for short, is the reigning king of window systems in UNIX-like operating systems (excepting macOS which uses Quartz). You will often see it referred to as X.Org; this is simply the most commonly used open source implementation of X.

I could try to outline what X.Org's problems are and how Wayland solves many of them, but I simply don't have the level of understanding necessary to do so confidently. One thing to note is that Wayland is first and foremost a protocol for the communication between a display server and applications. A display server can implement the Wayland protocol and is then referred to as a Wayland compositor.

If you want to learn more, here's a brief article on the subjecp.

Wayland first impressions with Sway

I recently setup Wayland on a brand new work computer, and going from a clean slate setup was really effortless. I chose Sway as my compositor and started it. And it just kind of worked. Outside of configuring Sway to my liking, I didn't really have to do much of anything for it to work.

On my private Dell XPS 15 where I'm already running X.Org, setting up Wayland was similarly effortless. I just installed Sway, and even though it doesn't support NVIDIA's proprietary drivers, running Sway with the --unsuported-gpu option just worked.

All-in-all, setup was a breeze and I did not encounter any problems at all.

Upsides of Sway

I immediately noticed some improvements in my desktop experience. The first came when connecting an external display, which Sway just found and started outputting an image to. In almost a decade of using X.Org on just shy of a half dozen devices, that has never happened before without effort on my part.

I was also treated with a complete lack of screen tearing when scrolling websites and documents, which I had a lot of under X.Org. I'm sure there's a way to configure that away with X and I never bothered to look into it more than stating that it wasn't as easy as toggling a flag, but it was just for free with Wayland. Now that it's gone I would have a hard time going back to it.

Finally, most things just kind of work. It's a big accolade to note that over a whole month of use, I haven't encountered a single show-stopping problem. But I have definitely encountered quite a few lesser ones.

Downsites of Sway

Pretty much all of the downsides I've encountered have to do with the fact that a lot of applications I've used over the years were written for X.Org. This means that many applications run under the the XWayland compatibility layer, which nullifies the performance improvements of Wayland's architecture. I've especially noted that startup times for GUI apps that run under XWayland are slow compared to running X.Org directly.

Another problem is that apps directly related to X.Org typically just do not function. For example, I've been using the import command from imagemagick to grab snippeted screenshots for nigh on a decade, and it doesn't work at all with Wayland as it expects to work with an X.Org backend. Similarly, Redshift which I've been using for years to adjust color temperature does not support Wayland. It results in a whole lot of alternative for Wayland kinds of searches, but they usually bear fruit. I found grim as a replacement for import and gammastep as a replacement for redshift that way.

The incompatibility with Redshift does bring up another interesting point, namely that Wayland is still neither complete nor stable. Color management is for example still not standardized. In some respects, stepping into the land of Way feels a bit like using a beta product.

Conclusions

Will I keep using Wayland? Definitely. I've only encountered a few very minor problems with application compatibility, and most I've found alternatives for. I'm even a little bit excited to find some need completely unfulfilled in the land of Wayland applications, because that would give me a good reason to implement it myself.