Introducing Wawona: A Nested Wayland Compositor for macOS
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Wawona isn’t just another display server—it is a native Wayland substrate designed from the ground up for the Apple and Android ecosystems. We are bringing high-performance, bare-metal Wayland execution to the hardware where it was previously impossible.

Why Wawona?

For years, running Wayland applications on a Mac meant living in a Virtual Machine or a slow emulation layer. Wawona changes that. By implementing a native Wayland compositor in Rust and targeting platform-native graphics APIs, we provide a bridge between the Linux ecosystem and Apple/Android hardware without the overhead of a guest OS.

High-Performance Architecture

Wawona is built on three core pillars that ensure it feels like a first-class citizen on every platform it touches:

1. The Rust Core

The heart of Wawona is a shared Rust backend managing the complex state of a Wayland compositor. With over 186 Rust crates integrated into our core, we handle everything from protocol registration to internal surface management with memory safety and high concurrency.

2. Native Graphics Frontends

We don't rely on generic abstraction layers.

  • Liquid Glass (macOS & iOS): A bespoke Metal-based rendering engine that leverages zero-copy IOSurface integration for near-instant frame delivery.
  • Android Vulkan: A specialized Vulkan frontend designed for the mobile GPU pipeline.

3. The Nix Build System

Developing across Three platforms (macOS, iOS, Android) usually requires a nightmare of SDK management. Wawona uses Nix to provide a hermetic, reproducible environment. We cross-compile 27 native C/C++ libraries (like FFmpeg, OpenSSL, and Weston) for every target automatically.

Beyond macOS

While Wawona started as a macOS project, our vision is multi-platform.

  • iOS: A native iPadOS/iOS app that turns your mobile device into a portable Wayland workstation.
  • Android: A Kotlin/JNI frontend that bundles its own Dropbear SSH and Vulkan rendering stack.

Getting Started

Wawona is currently in active development (v0.2.x). Whether you are looking to run remote apps via Waypipe or test native Wayland clients locally, we are building the fastest way to bridge your Linux-style workflows into the hardware you love.

Read our Documentation to start building, or check the FAQ for deep-dives into our architecture.