Wayland Desktop Landscape

This page gives brief lists of various desktop related packages for Wayland, such as compositors (correspond to Xorg's window manager), application launchers, and so on.

For how to install the core protocol package, see Wayland.

Compositors
A compositor in Wayland is the equivalent of a window manager in Xorg, except that for Xorg an additional compositor such as Compton or Picom would be needed.

In Wayland the task for both compositing and window management is delegated to the same program, which while making the program a bit larger, simplifies the render API by a large extent.

There are three major kinds of window managers:
 * Stacking (aka floating): The traditional mode of how window managers are expected to behave, similar to that of Windows or OS X. Windows act like pieces of paper on a desk, and can be stacked on top of each other.
 * Tiling: Windows are tiled so that none of them overlap. These usually make very extensive use of key-bindings and traditionally have little to no reliance on the mouse. Tiling window managers may be manual, offer predefined layouts, or both.
 * Dynamic: These window managers can dynamically switch between stacking and tiling configurations.

Display managers
A display manager(DM), sometimes known as login manager, presents the user with a graphical login screen to start a GUI session.

The display managers listed here support starting both X and Wayland sessions, the type represents the platform that the display-managers use for being drawn.

External resources

 * The wayland-desktop overlay.
 * Archlinux wiki article.