Wayland (protocol)

Wayland
Wayland
	Weston, the reference implementation of a Wayland server
Original author	Kristian Høgsberg
Developer	freedesktop.org et al.
Release	30 September 2008
Stable release	Wayland: 1.26.0 / 16 July 2026; Weston: 16.0.0 / 14 July 2026; Wayland-Protocols: 1.49 / 7 June 2026
Written in	C
Operating system	Official: Linux; Unofficial: NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD; Compatibility layer: Haiku
Predecessor	X Window System
Type	Windowing system; Display server;
License	MIT License
Website	wayland.freedesktop.org
Repository	gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland ;

Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager.

Wayland is developed by a group of volunteers initially led by Kristian Høgsberg as a free and open-source community-driven project with the aim of replacing the X Window System with a secure and simpler windowing system for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The project's source code is published under the terms of the MIT License, a permissive free software license. The Wayland project also develops an implementation of a Wayland compositor called Weston.