Linux how to check xorg or wayland

How to Switch Between Xorg and Wayland in Ubuntu

Brief: This quick tutorial shows you how to switch between xorg and Wayland display servers on Ubuntu and hopefully other Linux distributions.

I hope you know what a display server is. It is the underlying technology thanks to which, you can use your computer graphically.

Xorg (or X display server) is the legacy display server whereas Wayland is relatively newer. In 2017, Ubuntu made it the default with version 17.10. The experiment didn’t go well and they reverted to Xorg with Ubuntu 18.04. Now, Wayland becomes default again in version 21.04.

On the surface, you won’t notice any change in the display. But since Wayland is newer, many applications may not work properly with it. For example, there is not a single Linux screen recorder that works flawlessly with Wayland.

Whichever display server may be the default, the other one also remains accessible to you, and you may switch to it. I am going to show you how to switch between Xorg and Wayland display servers on Ubuntu.

Switch to Xorg from Wayland

Remember that I said Wayland is the default display server in Ubuntu 17.10. It also means that there are more than one display servers available. And we can simply switch between them. No need to install anything new.

Restart you Ubuntu system. At the login screen, under the password field, you’ll see a gear icon. Just click on it and you’ll see two options here.

The default Ubuntu means it will be using Wayland while Ubuntu on Xorg obviously means it will use Xorg. You can select Ubuntu on Xorg to use Xorg here.

Similarly, you can switch back to Wayland when you feel like it.

How to know if I am using Wayland or Xorg

Since we are talking about Wayland, Xorg etc, let’s also see how to know which display server is being used. To find that out, open a terminal and use the following command:

And then if you see X11, it’s Xorg. If you see Wayland, quite obviously, the display server in use is Wayland.

Quick Tip: Few programs that require root privileges have troubles with Wayland. For example, GParted didn’tt run at all in Ubuntu 17.10 with Wayland. If you don’t want to switch to Xorg, there is still a way to use these applications with sudo.

Use the command below

and then run the troublesome program with sudo like this:

This tip was suggested by It’s FOSS reader Sean and was found here.

I hope this quick tip helped you to switch between Xorg and Wayland in Ubuntu. Stay tuned for more Ubuntu tips and tricks.

Like what you read? Please share it with others.

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#1 2019-02-24 20:58:41

Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

I’m not sure if this post belongs in Newbie Corner or GNU/Linux Discussion.

I have a PowerSpec 1510 laptop with an i7-7700HQ and a GTX 1070. This laptop has the ability to use the discrete GPU as the primary/only GPU, and I intend to use that feature. I originally planned to use the i3 window manager, but then I learned that Wayland is the more secure, more lightweight successor to Xorg, and that Sway is basically a drop-in replacement for i3 using Wayland.

I like to be forward thinking and relatively secure with my PCs, so Sway/Wayland seemed to be the obvious choice. Then I learned that Nvidia are very bullheaded regarding how their driver handles Wayland, so Sway won’t support Nvidia proprietary drivers in the future. So my question is, are there any serious/significant drawbacks to using Xorg when compared to Wayland besides the more bloated code?

Last edited by BreakPoint (2019-02-24 21:00:36)

#2 2019-02-24 21:19:34

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

wayland will have better support for mixing «normal» displays and small HiDPI displays and scaling applications correctly on each monitor. Since your laptop has only 1080p that should be of no concern for you.

Last edited by progandy (2019-02-24 21:20:35)

#3 2019-02-24 21:34:32

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

X11 (the protocol, not the implementation) has some security issues that the wayland compositors seek to prevent (process isolation, every X11 client can control almost every X11 window and usually also log its input)
See xev & xdotool for a basic idea of what’s possible.

#4 2019-02-24 22:38:38

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

Is wayland more secure than Xorg? Probably. But only in the way that my display server, the full source code of which is below, is even far more secure than either of them:

Of course my display server does absolutely nothing you’d want it to, so it’s not very useful despite being 100% secure. Wayland probably does a couple of the things you want it to, so you can judge how useful it is compared to Xorg despite being somewhat more secure. Xorg will do pretty much everything you’d want, with the potential of being slightly less secure in some particular conditions which may not even be relevant on your machine.

Then also keep in mind, if you want to run any programs in Wayland, you’ll likely be running Xorg anyways, just as a child process of your Wayland compositor.

«UNIX is simple and coherent. » — Dennis Ritchie, «GNU’s Not UNIX» — Richard Stallman

#5 2019-02-25 00:46:56

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

Hi there, welcome to the boards. Not exactly a direct answer to your question regarding Wayland and it boils down to what level of isolation you need, Xorg is fine just don’t run it as root in the first place but I wouldn’t do that with Wayland either.
There are other ways to create isolation.
F.I. chroot/systemd-nspawn, very useful for all kinds of purposes.
There are also tools to implement/create a level of isolation, like Firejail, this tool may be be one that’s worth exploring.
I wont just put my dollar on Wayland or Xorg if it boils down to securing/isolating X apps(if needed), my 50 cents;)

#6 2019-02-25 01:20:53

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

Thanks guys. So basically Wayland is more secure, but Xorg doesn’t need to be actively worried about. Or to put it another way, there are probably much larger security concerns to deal with first if one is worried Xorg vulnerabilities. One has to walk a fine line between having a reasonably secure system and not spending all their time trying to patch every way to get into a system.

Now I’m off to watch Matthew Garrett tell me whether or not I should use UEFI and how useful/useless is Anti Evil Maid.

#7 2019-02-25 08:14:06

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

Maybe I should clarify that: there’s a design aspect in X11 that makes perfect process isolation impossible. Wayland compositors try to deal with that, but that doesn’t inherently make them (more) secure. You will never have perfect process isolation on a (desktop) system, because you want to transfer data between processes (aka copy and paste) and there’s IPC everywhere.

The actual security depends on the implemented channels and guards and their quality.
Eg. privacy related input dialogs can (and at times will) grab the X11 input at which point other clients can no longer listen (what does not keep out a keylogger w/ root permissions, nothing does) and while it’s certainly nasty if a foreign process can move/hide/close your windows, that doesn’t mean the client attached to that process is compromised in any further way.
Otoh it’s perfectly reasonable that there can be bugs in unrelated parts of the wayland compositors (which tend to be pretty damn complex, where sway is rather on the skinny side) that can bleed over into the compositor — esp. since the latter *will* have to weaken the isolation to some degree for a functional environment.

Security is war, not a peace of software.

#8 2019-02-25 08:23:34

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

Interesting blog post about Wayland misconceptions by the author of sway:

#9 2019-02-25 10:20:51

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

An interesting read. I wonder if there are any Nvidia engineers that wish they could open source their driver.

#10 2019-02-25 19:59:28

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

Wayland isn’t complete, also most of gnulinux gui apps use xorg (they launch on wayland by Xwayland compatibility xorg server for wayland). Sway doesn’t support my nvidia gt610, and nvidia driver at all (you need to use nouveau driver with sway)

#11 2019-02-26 02:03:23

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

An interesting read. I wonder if there are any Nvidia engineers that wish they could open source their driver.

According to Mr. DeVault, they are:

I was sad to conclude that we still aren’t going to see any meaningful involvement in open source from Nvidia. Many of their engineers are open to it, but I think that the engineering culture at Nvidia is unhealthy and that the engineers have very little influence.

#12 2019-03-01 19:14:41

Re: Help Choosing Wayland or Xorg

I remember sometime ago there was a similar thread about choice between Wayland and Xorg, but that time from the programmer perspective. The person was interested in whether Wayland security model fits his needs. After some days of research the person was highly dissatisfied with restrictions applied by Wayland.

Regarding your question about security. If you are the sole user of laptop, then using Wayland instead of Xorg would hardly make your laptop secure. If your are interesting in security, you should invest your efforts somewhere else.

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Linux how to check xorg or wayland

The X.Org project provides an open source implementation of the X Window System. The development work is being done in conjunction with the freedesktop.org community. The X.Org Foundation is the educational non-profit corporation whose Board serves this effort, and whose Members lead this work.

Xorg (commonly referred to as simply X) is the most popular display server among Linux users. Its ubiquity has led to making it an ever-present requisite for GUI applications, resulting in massive adoption from most distributions. See the Xorg Wikipedia article or visit the Xorg website for more details.

For the alternative and potential successor, see Wayland.

Contents

Installation

Xorg can be installed with the xorg-server package.

Additionally, some packages from the xorg-apps group are necessary for certain configuration tasks. They are pointed out in the relevant sections.

Finally, an xorg group is also available, which includes Xorg server packages, packages from the xorg-apps group and fonts.

Driver installation

The Linux kernel includes open-source video drivers and support for hardware accelerated framebuffers. However, userland support is required for OpenGL and 2D acceleration in X11.

First, identify the graphics card (the Subsystem output shows the specific model):

Then, install an appropriate driver. You can search the package database for a complete list of open-source video drivers:

Xorg searches for installed drivers automatically:

• If it cannot find the specific driver installed for the hardware (listed below), it first searches for fbdev ( xf86-video-fbdev ).
• If that is not found, it searches for vesa ( xf86-video-vesa ), the generic driver, which handles a large number of chipsets but does not include any 2D or 3D acceleration.
• If vesa is not found, Xorg will fall back to kernel mode setting, which includes GLAMOR acceleration (see modesetting(4) ).

In order for video acceleration to work, and often to expose all the modes that the GPU can set, a proper video driver is required:

Brand	Type	Driver	OpenGL	OpenGL (multilib)	Documentation
AMD / ATI	Open source	xf86-video-amdgpu	mesa	lib32-mesa	AMDGPU
		xf86-video-ati			ATI
	Proprietary	xf86-video-amdgpu	amdgpu-pro-libgl AUR	lib32-amdgpu-pro-libgl AUR	AMDGPU PRO
Intel	Open source	xf86-video-intel	mesa	lib32-mesa	Intel graphics
NVIDIA	Open source	xf86-video-nouveau	mesa	lib32-mesa	Nouveau
	Proprietary	nvidia	nvidia-utils	lib32-nvidia-utils	NVIDIA
		nvidia-390xx AUR	nvidia-390xx-utils AUR	lib32-nvidia-390xx-utils AUR

Other video drivers can be found in the xorg-drivers group.

Xorg should run smoothly without closed source drivers, which are typically needed only for advanced features such as fast 3D-accelerated rendering for games. The exceptions to this rule are recent GPUs (especially NVIDIA GPUs) not supported by open source drivers.

For a translation of model names (e.g. Radeon RX 6800) to GPU architectures (e.g. RDNA 2), see wikipedia:List of AMD graphics processing units.

GPU architecture	Open-source driver	Proprietary driver
RDNA, RDNA 2	AMDGPU	AMDGPU PRO
GCN 3, GCN 4, GCN 5
GCN 1, GCN 2	AMDGPU* / ATI	not available
TeraScale and older	ATI	not available

*: Experimental

Running

The Xorg(1) command is usually not run directly. Instead, the X server is started with either a display manager or xinit.

Configuration

Xorg uses a configuration file called xorg.conf and files ending in the suffix .conf for its initial setup: the complete list of the folders where these files are searched can be found in xorg.conf(5) , together with a detailed explanation of all the available options.

Using .conf files

The /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory stores host-specific configuration. You are free to add configuration files there, but they must have a .conf suffix: the files are read in ASCII order, and by convention their names start with XX— (two digits and a hyphen, so that for example 10 is read before 20). These files are parsed by the X server upon startup and are treated like part of the traditional xorg.conf configuration file. Note that on conflicting configuration, the file read last will be processed. For this reason, the most generic configuration files should be ordered first by name. The configuration entries in the xorg.conf file are processed at the end.

Using xorg.conf

Xorg can also be configured via /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/xorg.conf . You can also generate a skeleton for xorg.conf with:

This should create a xorg.conf.new file in /root/ that you can copy over to /etc/X11/xorg.conf .

Alternatively, your proprietary video card drivers may come with a tool to automatically configure Xorg: see the article of your video driver, NVIDIA or AMDGPU PRO, for more details.

Input devices

For input devices the X server defaults to the libinput driver ( xf86-input-libinput ), but xf86-input-evdev and related drivers are available as alternative.[1]

Udev, which is provided as a systemd dependency, will detect hardware and both drivers will act as hotplugging input driver for almost all devices, as defined in the default configuration files 10-quirks.conf and 40-libinput.conf in the /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory.

After starting X server, the log file will show which driver hotplugged for the individual devices (note the most recent log file name may vary):

If both do not support a particular device, install the needed driver from the xorg-drivers group. The same applies, if you want to use another driver.

To influence hotplugging, see #Configuration.

For specific instructions, see also the libinput article, the following pages below, or Fedora:Input device configuration for more examples.

Input identification

Mouse acceleration

Extra mouse buttons

Touchpad

Touchscreen

Keyboard settings

Monitor settings

Manual configuration

For a headless configuration, the xf86-video-dummy driver is necessary; install it and create a configuration file, such as the following:

Multiple monitors

See main article Multihead for general information.

See also GPU-specific instructions:

More than one graphics card

You must define the correct driver to use and put the bus ID of your graphic cards (in decimal notation).

To get your bus IDs (in hexadecimal):

The bus IDs here are 0:2:0 and 1:0:0.

Display size and DPI

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

The DPI of the X server is determined in the following manner:

1. The -dpi command line option has highest priority.
2. If this is not used, the DisplaySize setting in the X config file is used to derive the DPI, given the screen resolution.
3. If no DisplaySize is given, the monitor size values from DDC are used to derive the DPI, given the screen resolution.
4. If DDC does not specify a size, 75 DPI is used by default.

In order to get correct dots per inch (DPI) set, the display size must be recognized or set. Having the correct DPI is especially necessary where fine detail is required (like font rendering). Previously, manufacturers tried to create a standard for 96 DPI (a 10.3″ diagonal monitor would be 800×600, a 13.2″ monitor 1024×768). These days, screen DPIs vary and may not be equal horizontally and vertically. For example, a 19″ widescreen LCD at 1440×900 may have a DPI of 89×87. To be able to set the DPI, the Xorg server attempts to auto-detect your monitor’s physical screen size through the graphic card with DDC. When the Xorg server knows the physical screen size, it will be able to set the correct DPI depending on resolution size.

To see if your display size and DPI are detected/calculated correctly:

Check that the dimensions match your display size. If the Xorg server is not able to correctly calculate the screen size, it will default to 75×75 DPI and you will have to calculate it yourself.

If you have specifications on the physical size of the screen, they can be entered in the Xorg configuration file so that the proper DPI is calculated (adjust identifier to your xrandr output) :

If you only want to enter the specification of your monitor without creating a full xorg.conf create a new config file. For example ( /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-monitor.conf ):

If you do not have specifications for physical screen width and height (most specifications these days only list by diagonal size), you can use the monitor’s native resolution (or aspect ratio) and diagonal length to calculate the horizontal and vertical physical dimensions. Using the Pythagorean theorem on a 13.3″ diagonal length screen with a 1280×800 native resolution (or 16:10 aspect ratio):

This will give the pixel diagonal length and with this value you can discover the physical horizontal and vertical lengths (and convert them to millimeters):

Setting DPI manually

For RandR compliant drivers (for example the open source ATI driver), you can set it by:

Proprietary NVIDIA driver

You can manually set the DPI by adding the option under the Device or Screen section:

Manual DPI Setting Caveat

GTK very often overrides the server’s DPI via the optional Xresource Xft.dpi . To find out whether this is happening to you, check with:

With GTK library versions since 3.16, when this variable is not otherwise explicitly set, GTK sets it to 96. To have GTK apps obey the server DPI you may need to explictly set Xft.dpi to the same value as the server. The Xft.dpi resource is the method by which some desktop environments optionally force DPI to a particular value in personal settings. Among these are KDE and TDE.

Display Power Management

DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling) is a technology that allows power saving behaviour of monitors when the computer is not in use. This will allow you to have your monitors automatically go into standby after a predefined period of time.

Composite

The Composite extension for X causes an entire sub-tree of the window hierarchy to be rendered to an off-screen buffer. Applications can then take the contents of that buffer and do whatever they like. The off-screen buffer can be automatically merged into the parent window, or merged by external programs called compositing managers. For more information, see Wikipedia:Compositing window manager.

Some window managers (e.g. Compiz, Enlightenment, KWin, Marco, Metacity, Muffin, Mutter, Xfwm) do compositing on their own. For other window managers, a standalone composite manager can be used.

List of composite managers

• Picom — Compositor (a fork of Compton)

https://github.com/yshui/picom || picom

• Xcompmgr — Composite window-effects manager

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/xcompmgr/ || xcompmgr

• Unagi — Modular compositing manager which aims to be efficient, lightweight and responsive. It is written in C and based on XCB

https://projects.mini-dweeb.org/projects/unagi || unagiAUR

Tips and tricks

This article or section needs expansion.

Automation

This section lists utilities for automating keyboard / mouse input and window operations (like moving, resizing or raising).

Tool	Package	Manual	Keysym input	Window operations	Note
xautomation	xautomation	xte(1)	Yes	No	Also contains screen scraping tools. Cannot simulate F13+.
xdo	xdo	xdo(1)	No	Yes	Small X utility to perform elementary actions on windows.
xdotool	xdotool	xdotool(1)	Yes	Yes	Very buggy and not in active development, e.g: has broken CLI parsing.[2][3]
xvkbd	xvkbd AUR	xvkbd(1)	Yes	No	Virtual keyboard for Xorg, also has the -text option for sending characters.
AutoKey	autokey-qt AUR autokey-gtk AUR	documentation	Yes	Yes	Higher-level, powerful macro and scripting utility, with both Qt and Gtk front-ends.

Nested X session

This article or section needs expansion.

To run a nested session of another desktop environment:

This will launch a Window Maker session in a 1024 by 768 window within your current X session.

This needs the package xorg-server-xnest to be installed.

Starting GUI programs remotely

On-demand disabling and enabling of input sources

With the help of xinput you can temporarily disable or enable input sources. This might be useful, for example, on systems that have more than one mouse, such as the ThinkPads and you would rather use just one to avoid unwanted mouse clicks.

Find the name or ID of the device you want to disable:

For example in a Lenovo ThinkPad T500, the output looks like this:

Disable the device with xinput —disable device , where device is the device ID or name of the device you want to disable. In this example we will disable the Synaptics Touchpad, with the ID 10:

To re-enable the device, just issue the opposite command:

Alternatively using the device name, the command to disable the touchpad would be:

Killing application with hotkey

Run script on hotkey:

Block TTY access

This article or section needs expansion.

To block tty access when in an X add the following to xorg.conf:

Prevent a user from killing X

To prevent a user from killing when it is running add the following to xorg.conf:

Rootless Xorg

Xorg may run with standard user privileges instead of root (so-called «rootless» Xorg). This is a significant security improvement over running as root. Note that most display managers do not support rootless Xorg.

You can verify which user Xorg is running as with ps -o user $(pgrep Xorg) .

Using xinitrc

To configure rootless Xorg using xinitrc:

• Run startx as a subprocess of the login shell; run startx directly and do not use exec startx .
• Ensure that Xorg uses virtual terminal for which permissions were set, i.e. passed by logind in $XDG_VTNR via .xserverrc.
• If using certain proprietary display drivers, kernel mode settingauto-detection will fail. In such cases, you must set needs_root_rights = no in /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config .

Using GDM

GDM will run Xorg without root privileges by default when kernel mode setting is used.

Session log redirection

When Xorg is run in rootless mode, Xorg logs are saved to

/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.log . However, the stdout and stderr output from the Xorg session is not redirected to this log. To re-enable redirection, start Xorg with the -keeptty flag and redirect the stdout and stderr output to a file:

Alternatively, copy /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc to

/.xserverrc , and append -keeptty . See [4].

Troubleshooting

General

If a problem occurs, view the log stored in either /var/log/ or, for the rootless X default since v1.16, in

/.local/share/xorg/ . GDM users should check the systemd journal. [5]

The logfiles are of the form Xorg.n.log with n being the display number. For a single user machine with default configuration the applicable log is frequently Xorg.0.log , but otherwise it may vary. To make sure to pick the right file it may help to look at the timestamp of the X server session start and from which console it was started. For example:

• In the logfile then be on the lookout for any lines beginning with (EE) , which represent errors, and also (WW) , which are warnings that could indicate other issues.
• If there is an empty .xinitrc file in your $HOME , either delete or edit it in order for X to start properly. If you do not do this X will show a blank screen with what appears to be no errors in your Xorg.0.log . Simply deleting it will get it running with a default X environment.
• If the screen goes black, you may still attempt to switch to a different virtual console (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+F6 ), and blindly log in as root. You can do this by typing root (press Enter after typing it) and entering the root password (again, press Enter after typing it).

You may also attempt to kill the X server with: If this does not work, reboot blindly with:

• Check specific pages in Category:Input devices if you have issues with keyboard, mouse, touchpad etc.
• Search for common problems in ATI, Intel and NVIDIA articles.

Black screen, No protocol specified. Resource temporarily unavailable for all or some users

X creates configuration and temporary files in current user’s home directory. Make sure there is free disk space available on the partition your home directory resides in. Unfortunately, X server does not provide any more obvious information about lack of disk space in this case.

DRI with Matrox cards stopped working

If you use a Matrox card and DRI stopped working after upgrading to Xorg, try adding the line:

to the Device section that references the video card in xorg.conf .

Frame-buffer mode problems

X fails to start with the following log messages:

Program requests «font ‘(null)'»

Error message: unable to load font `(null)’ .

Some programs only work with bitmap fonts. Two major packages with bitmap fonts are available, xorg-fonts-75dpi and xorg-fonts-100dpi . You do not need both; one should be enough. To find out which one would be better in your case, try xdpyinfo from xorg-xdpyinfo , like this:

and use what is closer to the shown value.

Recovery: disabling Xorg before GUI login

If Xorg is set to boot up automatically and for some reason you need to prevent it from starting up before the login/display manager appears (if the system is wrongly configured and Xorg does not recognize your mouse or keyboard input, for instance), you can accomplish this task with two methods.

• Change default target to rescue.target. See systemd#Change default target to boot into.
• If you have not only a faulty system that makes Xorg unusable, but you have also set the GRUB menu wait time to zero, or cannot otherwise use GRUB to prevent Xorg from booting, you can use the Arch Linux live CD. Follow the installation guide about how to mount and chroot into the installed Arch Linux. Alternatively try to switch into another tty with Ctrl+Alt + function key (usually from F1 to F7 depending on which is not used by X), login as root and follow steps below.

Depending on setup, you will need to do one or more of these steps:

/.xinitrc or comment out the exec line in it.

X clients started with «su» fail

If you are getting «Client is not authorized to connect to server», try adding the line:

to /etc/pam.d/su and /etc/pam.d/su-l . pam_xauth will then properly set environment variables and handle xauth keys.

X failed to start: Keyboard initialization failed

If the filesystem (specifically /tmp ) is full, startx will fail. /var/log/Xorg.0.log will end with:

Make some free space on the relevant filesystem and X will start.

A green screen whenever trying to watch a video

Your color depth is set wrong. It may need to be 24 instead of 16, for example.

SocketCreateListener error

If X terminates with error message «SocketCreateListener() failed», you may need to delete socket files in /tmp/.X11-unix . This may happen if you have previously run Xorg as root (e.g. to generate an xorg.conf ).

Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key when trying to run a program as root

That error means that only the current user has access to the X server. The solution is to give access to root:

That line can also be used to give access to X to a different user than root.

Xorg-server Fatal server error: (EE) AddScreen/ScreenInit

If the Xorg server is not working randomly and in the Xorg log you see:

Then, this problem may be caused by systemd issue 13943. Set up early KMS start.

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