How to enable/disable wayland on Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop

ayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, and we can choose whether to enable/disable Wayland on Ubuntu. By default the Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish desktop already uses Wayland but it’s also possible to load to Xorg display server instead. In this tutorial, you will see how to disable and enable Wayland in Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to enable Wayland
• How to disable Wayland

• The default display manager for the GNOME desktop environment is GDM3. Therefore, we will edit the /etc/gdm3/custom.conf file to either disable or enable Wayland. Open a command line terminal and use nano or your favorite text editor to open this file with root permissions.

  $ sudo nano /etc/gdm3/custom.conf
  

• Within this file, look for the line that says #WaylandEnable=false. You can uncomment this line and either set it to true or false, depending on whether you want Wayland enabled or not.Enable Wayland:

  WaylandEnable=true
  

  Or disable Wayland:

  WaylandEnable=false
  

• After you have made the desired changes, save this file and exit it. You will need to restart GDM3 or reboot your Ubuntu 22.04 desktop for the changes to take effect.

  $ sudo systemctl restart gdm3
  

• To login to Ubuntu 22.04 using the Wayland click on the gear button and select Ubuntu option before you login. If you have disabled the Wayland display server, you will only see the Xorg option appear, or the gear button doesn’t show up at all.