What is Wayland Wayland is a project to define a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a library implementation of the 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. The wayland protocol is essentially only about input handling and buffer management. The compositor receives input events and forwards them to the relevant client. The clients creates buffers and renders into them and notifies the compositor when it needs to redraw. The protocol also handles drag and drop, selections, window management and other interactions that must go through the compositor. However, the protocol does not handle rendering, which is one of the features that makes wayland so simple. All clients are expected to handle rendering themselves, typically through cairo or OpenGL. The weston compositor is a reference implementation of a wayland compositor and the weston repository also includes a few example clients. This branch of wayland includes some of the latest suggested and necessary changes from the community. The intent is to be able to test patches while having something more progressive. To build this stack, use the build guide http://wayland.freedesktop.org/building.html substituting any repo found here https://github.com/soreau using the next branch for each. For example, to clone wayland you would use: git clone https://github.com/soreau/wayland.git -b next