While X11 (see ) is still the primary display technology on NixOS, Wayland support is steadily improving. Where X11 separates the X Server and the window manager, on Wayland those are combined: a Wayland Compositor is like an X11 window manager, but also embeds the Wayland 'Server' functionality. This means it is sufficient to install a Wayland Compositor such as sway without separately enabling a Wayland server: = true; This installs the sway compositor along with some essential utilities. Now you can start sway from the TTY console.