The Wayland Display Server

Wayland is enabled by default in the GNOME Desktop. You can choose to run GNOME in X11 by choosing the Gnome on xorg option in the session chooser on the login screen. Currently KDE still uses X11 and although there is a plasma-wayland session available, it is not considered stable or bugfree at this time.

One way to determine if you’re running in Wayland, is to check the value of the variable $WAYLAND_DISPLAY. To do this type:

If you are not running under Wayland the variable will not contain any values. You can also use loginctl to show you what tpe of session is running:

To determine your session number, simply typing loginctl should provide your session details.

There is also a legacy X11 server provided with Wayland for compatibility purposes. To determine what applications are running in this mode, you can run the following command:

There is also the lg (looking glass) tool in GNOME that will allow you to determine what display server a window is using. To do this, you run the application by typing lg in the run dialog or at the command line, select “Windows” in the upper right corner of the tool, and click on the application name (or open window) you want to know about. If the window is running in wayland it will say “MetaWindowWayland” and if it is running in X11 it will say “MetaWindowX11”.

To find out more about Wayland, please see the following website:

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/

If you need to determine if an issue you are experiencing is related to wayland, see the Fedora wiki at the link below:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_Wayland_problems