I am aware of the switches you can pass to each app to make it use native wayland, but is there any way to do it globally?
Probably not directly helpful, but Nix packages for Chromium and Electron apps are set up so that you can switch to native Wayland mode globally by setting an environment variable,
NIXOS_OZONE_WL=1
I don’t know of any global setting that isn’t distro-specific.
You mean Electron?
The Arch wiki has docs about that.
For Flatpaks I use the environment variable
ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=wayland
See my dotfiles on github.com/boredsquirrel/dotfiles
Same possible for Qt
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland
Is there a noticeable benefit to those apps running natively on Wayland vs running through xWayland?
For electron, if
ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT
andelectron-flags.conf
don’t work, you can also add--ozone-platform-hint=wayland
to the end ofExec
in each .desktop file (also works on Chromium,but not CEF AFAIKand sometimes CEF).There’s also
--ozone-platform-hint=auto
if you find yourself switching between X11 and Wayland.Spotify is CEF, I think, and it works pretty well.
Depends on your distribution. Arch packages some electron apps in a way, where they can accept their own flags through a dedicated file. For others, it’s just a plain
electron-flags.conf
in your~/.config
I would recommend visiting either the arch wiki, or tour distributions equivalent for details
Keep in mind that this does not apply to CEF apps, as that’s an entirely different framework
Do you mean Electron apps? I didn’t even know you could force them to use Wayland.
Is it bad if they use xwayland?
If you need fractional scaling, they are unusable blurry. Some screens just need fractional scaling so for those setups it’s almost essential to do this.
You need fractional scaling it your resolution is very high compared to the screen size. So something like a 15 inch 1440p screen would need 150% or 125% scaling because 100% is too small, 200% is too large but with anything in between, xwayland apps are blurry af.
Bad is relative. But I have some problems with scaling on a HiDPI display with some Electron apps. I think that might be solved if they were Wayland native.
They are kinda choppy, when compared to native Wayland apps and screensharing from an app, running in xwayland doesn’t really work…