Wayland (protocol)

Wayland
Original author(s)Kristian Høgsberg
Developer(s)freedesktop.org et al.
Initial release30 September 2008 (2008-09-30)
Stable release
Wayland: 1.23, Weston: 14.0.2 / 25 April 2025 (2025-04-25)
Repository
Written inC
Operating systemOfficial: Linux
Unofficial: NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD
Compatibility layer: Haiku
Type
LicenseMIT License
Websitewayland.freedesktop.org

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 licence.

As part of its efforts, the Wayland project also develops a implementation of a Wayland compositor called Weston.