Wayland/X11
Overview
One of the important components of any operating system is its display server. Windows, macOS, iOS, visionOS, and Android only provide one option. However, Linux has two options: X11 and Wayland.
X11 is an older standard and is being gradually phased out by the majority of Linux distributions in favor of supporting Wayland, which has been developed as a replacement. Wayland aims to provide modern functionality while featuring a more robust security model compared to X11. Applications running on X11 can still work when a distribution is using Wayland, thanks to a compatibility layer known as Xwayland.
Godot's support is still a work in progress, so for now, X11 remains the default setting for projects. This will likely change in a future version.
When to use Wayland
If you're an engine developer who wants to help improve support, or if you think Xwayland might be causing visual glitches in your exported project for whatever reason, then we would recommend using Wayland. But outside of that it's recommended to stick with X11 for now. It's important to note that while X11 applications can run on Wayland, the reverse is not true.
As of June 2026, most popular distributions are using Wayland by default, including (but not limited to) the following:
SteamOS
Bazzite
CachyOS
Fedora
Fedora Silverblue
Ubuntu
OpenSUSE
Keep in mind that for some distributions like Ubuntu, users may have changed the display server to X11 manually themselves.
Changing the display server setting
To change your display server to Wayland, click on ,
from here, go to and change the
option to wayland.
It's also possible to temporarily override the display server using the
--display-server <x11|wayland> command line argument
when launching the project.
Note
Regardless of how the display server is defined, if the project is configured to use Wayland, it will automatically fall back to X11 if Wayland is not available.
This also occurs the other way around; if the project is configured to use X11, it will fall back to Wayland if X11 is not available (i.e. when Xwayland isn't present on the system).
Disabling libdecor loading
libdecor loading on Wayland
has some quirks; it may be useful to disable it depending on your situation.
To do that, you need to set the GODOT_WAYLAND_DISABLE_LIBDECOR
environment variable to 1 like this:
OS.set_environment("GODOT_WAYLAND_DISABLE_LIBDECOR", "1")
High dynamic range support
Godot supports HDR output on Linux since 4.7. However, due to display server limitations, HDR output is only supported on Wayland, not on X11 (even through Xwayland).
Therefore, to make use of HDR output, you must set the display server to Wayland.
Note
GNOME versions prior to 50 have a bug that prevents HDR output from working on Wayland. If you are using an older version of GNOME, you will need to upgrade to version 50 or later to use HDR output on Wayland.