Wayland is a display protocol that is used to communicate between a display server, the applications running under the client and the client itself. This allows the applications to display their content on the screen. Wayland is commonly used as the default display protocol for most window managemant on modern Linux distributions. It is seen as a replacement for the older, and slower X11 system.
Some advantages of Wayland are:
- It has improved security.
- It has better support for modern hardware and graphics APIs.
- It has a more flexible design.
Some disadvantages of Wayland are:
- It is relatively new.
- Adoption and development is going on, meaning that there is less support for actual applications.
To use Wayland, you will need to install a Wayland compositor on your system. This is a program that will implement the Wayland protocol and manage the display of windows and other graphical content on your screen.
Some examples of Wayland compositors are:
- sway
- hyprland
- river
- labwc
- weston
- wayfire
- mutter
- kwin
After this, make sure that nothing is taking over your display and run your compositor and change WAYLAND_DISPLAY for some applications if needed.
After opening sway you will see that its keybindings and configuration is quite similiar to i3, which makes sense because it is i3 except its using wayland rather than X11. So you can either copy your existing i3 configuration or spend some time in the docs and build your own config.
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