Wayland Desktop Landscape

This page gives brief lists of various desktop related packages for Wayland, such as compositors, application launchers, and so on.

For the basics of Wayland, see Wayland.

Notice: Many packages below are found in the overlay wayland-desktop, but not yet merged to the official portage tree.

Compositors
In Gentoo, many Wayland compositors are found in the category.

Window managers can be classified mostly as three kinds below. (Notice Wayland compositors have the role 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.