Wayland

Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X. "It is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. The compositor can be a standalone display server running on Linux kernel modesetting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a wayland client itself. The clients can be traditional applications, X servers (rootless or fullscreen) or other display servers." Where possible, Wayland reuses existing drivers and infrastructure, such as the DRI drivers, the kernel side GEM scheduler and kernel mode setting.

USE flags
Since GTK+3 Wayland is supported. For Qt an additional package called is required.

Weston
Part of the Wayland project is a reference implementation of a Wayland compositor called Weston. Weston can run as an X client or under Linux KMS.

Usage
The Weston compositor is a minimal and fast compositor and is suitable for many embedded and mobile use cases.

Enable examples for building example applications like weston-image or weston-view.

Weston is configured with. Examples can be found at the Arch Linux Wiki.

Launch Weston with the DRM backend on a VT:

Launch Weston with the DRM backend and XWayland support:

Launch Weston (wayland-1) nested in another Weston instance (wayland-0):

From an X terminal, launch Weston with the x11 backend:

Applications
As mentioned above GTK3+ and Qt support Wayland. Unfortunately most applications still require the X server. Several scenarios are possible to get them working.
 * Porting the application by rewriting the components with X.org dependencies such that they work also for wayland. Cf. [//http://wayland.freedesktop.org/extras.html Wayland-Ports]. Other examples are mpv which is a video player based on MPlayer/mplayer2 or the minimalist web-client xombrero. GNOME and KDE are expected to be ported to it.


 * Xclients can be run on Wayland. Afterwards the required application can be run as usual on the Xclient. See [//http://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html X server running on wayland].
 * Xwayland it the third option which is running Wayland on the X server.

External resources

 * https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wayland
 * http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/raring/man1/weston.1.html