Individual GNOME applications

Individual GNOME applications

Already, we are seeing Wayland compositors appear that do not have Xwayland support. Niri does not as an example. And the Louvre Wayland compositor toolkit only supports Xwayland in rootful mode.

All the toolkits support Wayland now. This means GTK and Qt of course but even stuff like FLTK and wxWidgets. Newer toolkits like Iced are Wayland only as are emerging projects like Cosmoe (BeOS API on Wayland). You do not need to run Xwayland to run any of these apps.

Steam still requires Xwayland (for now) as do Java Swing apps (like JetBrains IDEs and BurpSuite). But it may not be long before 90% of the apps that 90% of users run are Wayland native. Will all those users continue to run an X server in the background that they never use? (Xwayland).

First, Niri now supports Xwayland, via xwayland-satellite, as of this commit to Niri, as long as xwayland-satellite has the associated listenfd commits. These will be in the next release as of 2025-06-27.

Second, Xwayland supports socket activation by design - that's what the -listenfd option is for. A Wayland compositor that supports Xwayland but doesn't want to waste resources can open the X11 listening socket, wait for the notification that there's an incoming connection, and spawn Xwayland when an X11 client tries to connect to it; this would let you have Xwayland on your system, not consuming resources (other than storage on your SSD) until you run an X11 client.

And, at least in theory, Xwayland can be terminated when the last X11 client exits, so that running an X11 application doesn't force you to spend the resources on Xwayland until you next log out.