Wayland

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Wayland is a modern display server protocol intended as a replacement for the legacy X11 system.

For additional details, see NixOS Manual: Chapter - Wayland.

Checking for Wayland

To check if you are using Wayland, run the following command:

$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

If wayland is returned, you are running Wayland.

Setup

Two things are required for running Wayland: a compatible Display Manager, and a compatible Compositor.

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Display Managers

Display Managers are responsible for handling user login.

The following Display Managers support using both X and Wayland protocols:

Graphical

gdm is the GNOME Display Manager.
sddm is the default Display Manager for KDE. Wayland support is currently experimental.

Text-based

Compositors

For the purposes of this basic overview, a compositor can be thought of as equivalent to an X Desktop Environment.

Note: It is important to remember that this is not actually the case as there are multiple differences between how X and Wayland work internally.

Wayland Native

Sway is an i3-like compositor.
Hyprland the dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that doesn't sacrifice on its looks.
Niri is a scrollable tiling compositor.

X and Wayland support

Mutter is the default compositor for the GNOME Desktop Environment.
KWin is the default compositor for the KDE Desktop Environment.

Applications

Not all apps support running natively on Wayland. To work around this, Xwayland should be enabled.

Note: Enabling XWayland varies slightly from Compositor to Compositor, and may already be enabled. Consult your Compositor's documentation and/or nix file for how to enable.

Electron and Chromium

Ozone Wayland (which uses Wayland native instead of Xwayland) support in Chromium and Electron based applications can be enabled by setting the environment variable "NIXOS_OZONE_WL" with NIXOS_OZONE_WL=1 (also see commit).

As of NixOS 25.05 ("Warbler"), if XDG_SESSION_TYPE is unset or set to "wayland", chromium and electron apps will default to wayland native. This ignores the DISPLAY environment variable.

Declaratively (permanent)

NixOS

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

environment.sessionVariables.NIXOS_OZONE_WL = "1";

Imperatively (each time an application is launched)

Example: to launch code (📦︎ vscode)

$ NIXOS_OZONE_WL=1 code

Virtualization

To have wayland work inside of QEMU, you may need to pass -vga qxl.