The Wayland Itches project

Now that GNOME3 on Wayland is the default in Fedora I've been trying to use this as my default desktop, but until recently I've kept falling back to GNOME3 on Xorg because of various small issues.

To fix this I've switched to using GNOME3 on Wayland as day to day desktop now and I'm working on fixing any issues which this causes as I hit them, aka "The Wayland Itches project". So far I've hit and fixed the following issues:

1. TopIcons

The TopIcons extension, which I depend on for some of my workflow, was not working well under Wayland with GNOME-3.30, only the top row of icons was clickable. This was fixed in GNOME-3.32, but with GNOME-3.32 using TopIcons was causing gnome-shell to go into a loop leading to a very high CPU load. The day I wanted to start looking into fixing this I was chatting to Carlos Garnacho and he pointed out to me that this was fixed a couple of days ago in gnome-shell. The fix for this is in gnome-shell 3.32.2 .

2. Hotkeys/desktop shortcuts not working in VirtualBox Virtual Machines

When running a VirtualBox VM under GNOME3 on Wayland, hotkeys such as alt+tab go to the GNOME3 desktop, rather then being forwarded to the VM as happens under Xorg. This can be fixed by changing 2 settings:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter.wayland xwayland-allow-grabs true

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter.wayland xwayland-grab-access-rules "['VirtualBox Machine']"

This is a decent workaround, but we want things to "just work" of course, so we have been working on some changes to make this just work in the next GNOME version.

3. firefox-wayland

I've been also trying to use firefox-wayland as my day to day browser, this has lead to me filing three firefox bugs and I've switched back to regular

firefox (x11) for now.

If you have any Wayland Itches yourself, please drop me an email at [email protected] explaining them in as much detail as you can and I will see what I can do. Note that I typically get a lot of emails when asking for feedback like this, so I cannot promise that I will reply to every email; but I will be reading them all.

Tags:fedora, gnome , wayland , xorg