Application Issues

Electron applications

Electron-based applications can run directly on Wayland, but it's not the default.

For Electron > 28, you can set an environment variable:

environment {
    ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT "auto"
}

For previous versions, you need to pass command-line flags to the target application:

--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform-hint=auto

If the application has a desktop entry, you can put the command-line arguments into the Exec section.

VSCode

If you're having issues with some VSCode hotkeys, try starting Xwayland and setting the DISPLAY=:0 environment variable for VSCode. That is, still running VSCode with the Wayland backend, but with DISPLAY set to a running Xwayland instance. Apparently, VSCode currently unconditionally queries the X server for a keymap.

WezTerm

Note

Both of these issues seem to be fixed in the nightly build of WezTerm.

There's a bug in WezTerm that it waits for a zero-sized Wayland configure event, so its window never shows up in niri. To work around it, put this window rule in the niri config (included in the default config):

window-rule {
    match app-id=r#"^org\.wezfurlong\.wezterm$"#
    default-column-width {}
}

This empty default column width lets WezTerm pick its own initial width which makes it show up properly.

There's another bug in WezTerm that causes it to choose a wrong size when it's in a tiled state, and prevent resizing it. Niri puts windows in the tiled state with prefer-no-csd. So if you hit this problem, comment out prefer-no-csd in the niri config and restart WezTerm.

Ghidra

Some Java apps like Ghidra can show up blank under xwayland-satellite. To fix this, run them with the _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 environment variable.

rofi-wayland

There's a bug in rofi-wayland that prevents it from accepting keyboard input on niri with errors in the output. It's been fixed in rofi, but the fix had not been released yet.

Fullscreen games

Some video games, both Linux-native and on Wine, have various issues when using non-stacking desktop environments. Most of these can be avoided with Valve's gamescope, for example:

gamescope -f -w 1920 -h 1080 -W 1920 -H 1080 --force-grab-cursor --backend sdl -- <game>

This command will run in 1080p fullscreen—make sure to replace the width and height values to match your desired resolution. --force-grab-cursor forces gamescope to use relative mouse movement which prevents the cursor from escaping the game's window on multi-monitor setups. Note that --backend sdl is currently also required as gamescope's default Wayland backend doesn't lock the cursor properly (possibly related to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/1711).

Steam users should use gamescope through a game's launch options by replacing the game executable with %command%. Other game launchers such as Lutris have their own ways of setting gamescope options.

Running X11-based games with this method doesn't require Xwayland as gamescope creates its own Xwayland server. You can run Wayland-native games as well by passing --expose-wayland to gamescope, therefore eliminating X11 from the equation.

Steam

On some systems, Steam will show a fully black window. To fix this, navigate to Settings -> Interface (via Steam's tray icon, or by blindly finding the Steam menu at the top left of the window), then disable GPU accelerated rendering in web views. Restart Steam and it should now work fine.

If you do not want to disable GPU accelerated rendering you can instead try to pass the launch argument -system-composer instead.

Steam notifications don't run through the standard notification daemon and show up as floating windows in the center of the screen. You can move them to a more convenient location by adding a window rule in your niri config:

window-rule {
    match app-id="steam" title=r#"^notificationtoasts_\d+_desktop$"#
    default-floating-position x=10 y=10 relative-to="bottom-right"
}