Attention: Here be dragons

This is the latest (unstable) version of this documentation, which may document features not available in or compatible with released stable versions of Godot.

Wayland/X11

Overview

One of the important components of any operating system is its display server. Windows and MacOS only provide one option, Linux however has two, X11 and Wayland.

X11 is an older standard and is currently being gradually phased out by the majority of linux distributions in favor of supporting Wayland, which has been developed as a replacement. 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 game projects, that 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 January 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 setting

To change your display server to Wayland click on Project > project settings, from here, go to Display Server and change the driver.linuxbsd option to wayland.

Disabling Libdecor loading

Libdecor loading on Wayland has some quirks and 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")

User-contributed notes

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