Labwc Alternatives

Labwc is described as 'Stands for Lab Wayland Compositor, where lab can mean any of the following:' and is a Window Manager in the os & utilities category. There are more than 25 alternatives to Labwc for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Wayland, X11, BSD and FreeBSD apps. The best Labwc alternative is Hyprland, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Labwc are Sway, niri, GlazeWM and Cardboard (Wayland compositor).

More about Labwc

Labwc alternatives page was last updated Jan 29, 2026

term.everything
1 like
Run any GUI app in the terminal?.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (AGPL-3.0)
Application type
Wayland Compositor
Platforms
Linux
+1
Is term.everything a good alternative to Labwc?
hikari
2 likes
hikari [ja. Light] is a stacking Wayland compositor which is actively developed on FreeBSD but also supports Linux.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Platforms
Linux
BSD
+2
Is hikari a good alternative to Labwc?
Miriway
1 like
Miriway is a starting point for creating a Wayland based desktop environment using Mir.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-3.0)
Application type
Wayland Compositor
Platforms
Linux
Wayland
Is Miriway a good alternative to Labwc?
Pinnacle
1 like
Pinnacle is a Wayland compositor built in Rust using Smithay. It's my attempt at creating something like AwesomeWM for Wayland.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-3.0)
Application type
Window Manager
Platforms
Linux
Wayland
Is Pinnacle a good alternative to Labwc?
miracle-wm
1 like
A Wayland compositor based on Mir. It features a tiling window manager at its core, very much in the style of i3 and sway. The intention is to build a compositor that is flashier and more feature-rich than either of those compositors, like swayfx.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-3.0)
Application type
Window Manager
Origin
United States
Platforms
Linux
Wayland
Is miracle-wm a good alternative to Labwc?
W
W
Waybox
1 like
An openbox clone on Wayland (WIP).
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (MIT)
Application types
Window Manager
Wayland Compositor
Platforms
Linux
Openbox
Wayland
W
Is Waybox a good alternative to Labwc?
Polonium
1 like
An autotile manager for Plasma 6. An (unofficial) spiritual successor to Bismuth built on KWin 6. The descendant of autotile.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (MIT)
Application types
Window Manager
Wayland Compositor
Alerts
Discontinued
Platforms
Linux
KDE
Wayland
Is Polonium a good alternative to Labwc?
D
D
dwl
1 like
dwl is a compact, hackable compositor for Wayland based on wlroots. It is intended to fill the same space in the Wayland world that dwm does in X11, primarily in terms of functionality, and secondarily in terms of philosophy. Like dwm, dwl is:
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-3.0)
Platforms
Linux
Wayland
+5
D
Is dwl a good alternative to Labwc?
doWM
1 like
doWM is a beautiful floating and tiling window manager for X11 completely written in golang.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (MIT)
Application type
Window Manager
Platforms
X11
Linux
BSD
+6
Is doWM a good alternative to Labwc?
V
V
Vivarium
1 like
A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor using wlroots, with desktop semantics inspired by xmonad.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-3.0)
Application type
Window Manager
Alerts
Discontinued
Platforms
Linux
Wayland
V
Is Vivarium a good alternative to Labwc?
Gnome Mutter
1 like
Mutter is a Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-2.0)
Application type
Window Manager
Origin
United States
Platforms
Linux
GNOME
Wayland
Is Gnome Mutter a good alternative to Labwc?
yashiki
Like
macOS tiling window manager.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (MIT)
Application type
Window Manager
Platforms
Mac
Is yashiki a good alternative to Labwc?