The WM_CLASS Property is used on X11 to assign rules to certain windows, e.g. “this is a GIMP window, it should appear on workspace number 16.” It consists of two fields, name and class.

Wayland (or rather, the XDG shell protocol – core Wayland knows nothing about this) only has a single field called app_id.

When you run X11 programs under Wayland, you use XWayland, which is baked into most compositors. Then you have to deal with all three fields.

Some compositors map name to app_id, others map class to app_id, and even others directly expose the original name and class.

Apparently, there is no consensus.

… but you can’t set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland globally, because that breaks Wine again …

… okay, the SDL backend works if you also set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org dmenu is a great example.

There have been several attempts at porting dmenu from X11 to Wayland. Well, not exactly “porting” it, more like rewriting it from scratch. Turns out: It’s not that easy.

dmenu is super fast and reliable. None of the Wayland rewrites are (at least none of the popular ones that I know of). They are either bloated and/or slow.

It takes a lot of discipline and restraint to write simple software and not blow up the codebase. This is much harder than people think. It’s a form of art, really.

QEMU on Wayland unusable, because it can’t grab the mouse … I’ll add it to my TODO list and investigate/report it eventually.

Someone did a thing:

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/114763322251054485

I’ve been silently wondering all the time if this was possible, but never investigated: Keep doing X11 but use Wayland as a backend.

This uses XWayland’s “rootful” mode, which basically just gives you a normal Wayland window with all the X11 stuff happening inside of it:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootful-Useful

In other words, put such a window in fullscreen and you (more or less) have good old X11 running in a Wayland window.

(For me, personally, this won’t be the way forward. But it’s a very interesting project.)

Sway 1.11 Released With New Wayland Protocols & More
Comments ⌘ Read more

wl-kbptr: Control the mouse pointer with the keyboard on Wayland
Comments ⌘ Read more

Fedora 43 Cleared To Ship With Wayland-Only GNOME
Comments ⌘ Read more

LXQt 2.2.0 released
LXQt, the Qt-based alternative to KDE as Xfce is the GTK-based alternative to GNOME, has released version 2.2.0. LXQt is in the middle of its transition to Wayland, and as such, this release brings a number of fixes and improvements for Wayland, like improved multi-display support and updated compatibility with Wayland compositors. Beyond all the Wayland work, LXQt Power Management now supports power profiles, text rendering in QTerminal and QTermWidget has been improved, the file manager PC … ⌘ Read more

KDE splits KWin into kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland
One of the biggest behind-the-scenes changes in the upcoming Plasma 6.4 release is the split of kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland codebases. With this blog post, I would like to delve in what led us to making such a decision and what it means for the future of kwin_x11. ↫ Vlad Zahorodnii For the most part, this change won’t mean much for users of KWin on either Wayland or X11, at least for now. At least for the remainder of the Plasma 6.x life … ⌘ Read more

it’s been while since I’d stopped #window-manager hopping and just settled with #Herbstluftwm but I’m NGL, the River #Wayland compositor is starting to grow on me… I’m still not sure if it’s just me but something about it feels clean and snappy. The shortcuts in the vanilla/example configuration feel a bit clunky, but then again, it’s just me being used to the same old ones I keep adopting and replicating across WMs. I’ve got 0 energy for ricing so I’ll just roll with the vanilla config as is (maybe add in a short-cut for a launcher but that will be it).

12 years of incubating Wayland color management
The Wayland color-management protocol extension has landed on Feb 13th, 2025, in upstream wayland-protocols repository in the staging directory. It was released with wayland-protocols 1.41. The extension enables proper interactions between traditional (sRGB), Wide Color Gamut (WCG), and High Dynamic Range (HDR) image sources and displays once implemented in Wayland compositors and used in applications. Of course, a protocol is just a la … ⌘ Read more

Chromium Ozone/Wayland: the last mile stretch
Lets start with some context, the project consists of implementing, shipping and maintaining native Wayland support in the Chromium project. Our team at Igalia has been leading the effort since it was first merged upstream back in 2016. For more historical context, there are a few blog posts and this amazing talk, by my colleagues Antonio Gomes and Max Ihlenfeldt, presented at last year’s Web Engines Hackfest. Especially due to the Lacros pr … ⌘ Read more

Cyrix126 releases Gupaxx v1.5.1
Cyrix1261 has released Gupaxx 2 version 1.5.13 with multiple bug fixes:

Freeze after some time
Xmrig could not be started after Xmrig-Proxy manually (Linux/MacOS)
Node and Proxy custom args were not parsed correctly
Unable to save node selection in Proxy Tab
Crashes on Wayland [..]

The full changelog, sources, SHA256SUM and .asc files can be found on Github3.

This project is a Gupax 4 fork which in … ⌘ Read more

Keyboard layouts
I’ve updated my article about keyboard layouts with XKB after 13
years!

https://hack.org/mc/writings/xkb.html

I’ve edited it so the focus is on the layouts if you just want to grab
them and don’t need any handholding. Also added Thinkpad layouts along
with the original HHKB layouts.

It now also includes instructions for use with the River and Sway
Wayland compositors as well as X11.

I will probably update it soon with some images of different Thinkpad
keyboards. ⌘ Read more

Don’t install Trinity desktop on Slackware. Kde wayland does not work anymore and regular kde x11 is mixed with parts from Trinity. Going to need to do a reinstall. Plus Trinity is half working anyway. Best to stick with Kde and xfce.

https://github.com/Ferdi265/wl-mirror wayland output mirror client

https://artixlinux.org Running artix full wayland setup with sway as WM and runit as init. KISS and flying, so cool :)

Huge Tails update. Better persistent storage, Wayland, QR codes for bridges: https://tails.boum.org/news/version_5.8/index.en.html

Wayland tech tip #3: Be sure to install warpd-wayland-git instead of warpd-git from the AUR, otherwise you’re gonna have a bad time.

The Lunduke Journal Podcast – April 27, 2022
Listen now (45 min) | Wayland or X11? BBS tips? VR remakes of classic games? ⌘ Read more

Wayland tech tip #2: “wev” is a great “xev” clone for Wayland. It’s available on the AUR (wev) or at https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/wev.

Aliasing “startx” to “sl” is an essential part of one’s migration to Wayland.

Wayland, window managers and suicide ⌘ https://hack.org/mc/blog/wayland-window-managers.html

Siemens RTL Tiling WM, Blit, Andrew Window System och Wayland ⌘ https://hack.org/mc/blog/siemens-rtl.html

Ubuntu LTS: Unity, Sugar and Wayland ⌘ https://hack.org/mc/blog/ubuntu.html