Linux How to find out the session type: Wayland or Xorg?

[dEEpEst]

How to find out the session type: Wayland or Xorg?

Many popular distributions already use Wayland by default. However, Wayland still has problems. Many old programs are not supported or work poorly.

If you have any problems with older programs, you need to check what display server you are using. There are several ways to do this.

The easiest way to see which display server is currently in use is to display the contents of the XDG_SESSION_TYPE environment variable:

$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
wayland

You can also find out the type of the current session using loginctl . To do this, you first need to list the active sessions using list-sessions :

$ loginctl list-sessions

SESSION UID USER SEAT TTY
3 1000 parallels seat0 tty2
c1 127 gdm seat0 tty1

2 sessions listed.

Then we display the type of a specific session using the show-session option:

$ loginctl show-session 3 -p Type
Type=wayland

Or you can do it all with one command, getting the session ID from the XDG_SESSION_ID environment variable (if defined):

$ loginctl show-session "$XDG_SESSION_ID" -p Type