Native Wayland support for the Linux UI

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
go, linux
Domain
desktop

Research direction

Start with ui/app_linux.go and inspect how the Linux UI selects XWayland and opens the tray popup. Compare the listed Wayland routes—wlr-layer-shell, GNOME Shell positioning, and a native tray menu fallback—and determine how the popup should behave across those environments. Done means the Linux UI runs natively on Wayland and the popup opens next to the tray icon.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

On Wayland sessions the Linux UI runs through XWayland (GDK_BACKEND=x11 in ui/app_linux.go). Wayland doesn't let a normal window choose its own position, and the tray popup needs to open next to the tray icon.

Running under XWayland works, but it causes problems with fractional and mixed scaling (see #83) and relies on XWayland being installed.

Possible routes to running natively:

  • wlr-layer-shell, which KWin supports, to place the popup ourselves
  • the GNOME Shell extension drawing or positioning the popup on GNOME
  • a fallback to the native tray menu where neither works
Dominant language
Go
Stars
26
Forks
10
Avg merge
5h 49m
Merged PRs (30d)
12

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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