GNOME is a desktop environment that aims to be simple and easy to use. It is designed by The GNOME Project and is composed entirely of free and open-source software. The default display is Wayland instead of Xorg.
Wayland
Wayland is both a display server and its reference implementation in Unix-like operating systems that is meant to improve upon and replace the X Window System. The primary difference between Wayland and X is that, in Wayland, the compositor is the server rather than a separate component. This enables clients to exchange events directly with the compositor, cutting out the X server as a middle man.
Wayland was first released in 2008, and although X.Org Server still dominates in Linux distributions, adoption of Wayland has been slowly increasing. For example, Fedora® started using Wayland as its default display server starting with version 25, released in November of 2016.
gnome-session-wayland software package provides GNOME Session Manager – GNOME 3 session (transitional package), you can install in your Ubuntu system by running the commands given below on the terminal:
$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install gnome-session-wayland
gnome-session-wayland is now installed in your system.
Make ensure the gnome-session-wayland package were installed using the commands given below:
$ sudo dpkg-query -l | grep gnome-session-wayland *
List of files in the Package
Below files are included in the gnome-session-wayland package:
/usr/share/doc/gnome-session-wayland/changelog.Debian.gz /usr/share/doc/gnome-session-wayland/copyright
Starting wayland sessions
Manually starting a Wayland session is possible with XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session gnome-session. Alternatively, call gnome-shell directly with its wayland flag from any available tty:
$ gnome-shell --wayland