Not about applications, but about desktop environments, right?

Posted Aug 26, 2025 13:05 UTC (Tue) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050)
In reply to: Not about applications, but about desktop environments, right? by anton
Parent article: Wayback 0.1 released

> just a few weeks ago I read that Xwayland allows me to use X applications, but not window managers. Good to see that weakness addressed.

That's mixing up rootless vs rootful Xwayland.

Rootless Xwayland is used for seamless integration of X client windows in a Wayland session, via one Wayland surface per top-level X window. In this case, Xwayland is started by the Wayland compositor, and the latter has to act as the X window manager (XWM). Running another XWM isn't possible in this case.

Wayback OTOH uses rootful Xwayland, which uses a single Wayland surface for the X root window and otherwise works mostly like any other X server. Any XWM can be used in this case.

> in earlier times browsers could display on a remote X display; that became impractically slow at some point.

FWIW, Firefox runs well (including HW acceleration using the GPU on the remote machine) as a native Wayland client via Waypipe, which is conceptually similar to SSH X forwarding.