Wayland and Wacom devices

Hidden: removed from menu bar Feb 2022

Overview:

Wayland is the technical term for a display server protocol. Wayland is also used loosely to refer to the project in general and the transition away from the Xorg rendering system and many of its legacy components.

For users:

While Canonical's Mir was originally intended as another alternative to Xorg, Ubuntu's adoption of Wayland has demonstrated a consensus forming around Wayland in the Linux community.

Application Support for Wayland:

In release 3.24, GNOME added Wayland support for Wacom settings and tablet handling^*.

However, as a practical matter, applications that use Wacom devices are still at work on support for Wayland. Krita has postponed support for Wayland until at least 2019 ^*. GIMP still lacks full Wayland support ^*.

Switching back to Xorg:

The good news is that most distributions that ship with Wayland as the default support switching back to the Xorg display server. On many distributions you can accomplish this by selecting an option at the login screen. See this example for how to switch on Ubuntu 17.10.

For Developers:

Functionality of our xf86-input-wacom driver has been replaced by libinput under the Wayland project.

If you would like to test with the reference implementation of the Wayland protocol (Weston), the following links offer different strategies for building Weston:

To start, we would recommend building Weston in a user directory (and starting from a VT terminal^*) as opposed to replacing your system's existing display server.