Some Of The Lesser Known Wayland Compositors

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 19 March 2017 at 08:47 AM EDT. 26 Comments
WAYLAND
While GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma, and Enlightenment are among the most talked about Wayland desktop/compositor implementations right now, there are still many active smaller projects working on their own Wayland compositors. Here's a look at some of them.

Given the recent Sway compositor update, I decided to take a fresh look at some of the other Wayland compositor alternatives on GitHub. Some of them include:

Grefsen - Grefsen is a Qt/Wayland compositor that provides a minimal desktop. Qt 5.8+ is needed. It looks decent for an independent project:


Westford - A Wayland compositor written in Java with OpenGL.

WLC - Not a compositor itself per say, but rather a Wayland compositor library for helping developers build their own Wayland compositors.

ASC - ASC is designed as a simple Wayland compositor. From the developer, "In under 50 lines of code, I've got something that can run both native Wayland programs and X11 programs via Xwayland (which is automatically launched on startup)."

Rustland - A Wayland compositor written in Rust and implements an automatic tiling window manager.

Fireplace - Another Wayland compositor written in Rust. A screenshot from the project:


SWC - Another Wayland compositor library.

Way Cooler -Another tiling window manager written in Rust for Wayland. Way-Cooler can be customized by Lua and was inspired by i3 and Awesome. From their project site:


DWC - A dynamic Wayland compositor that tries to keep things simple.

Wavy - A tiling Wayland compositor making use of WLC. Again, inspired by i3 and Awesome.

Wayhouse - A Wayland compositor based on libweston.

Did I miss out on any other interesting Wayland compositor projects? There are a lot out there trying to be tiling window managers inspired by i3/Awesome as well as a lot of Wayland projects using Rust, so apologies if I overlooked an interesting one, but feel free to share your favorite independent Wayland projects with us in the forums.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week