For years Electron apps were notorious for continuing to depend upon X11/XWayland and not jive well with the modern Wayland experience on modern Linux desktops. But for the past several months, Wayland has been well supported out-of-the-box on upstream Electron. An Electron blog post this week outlined the technical work done for achieving good Wayland support.
Beyond the upstream work into Chromium/CEF, Electron developers also invested a lot into getting their Wayland support in order so XWayland doesn’t need to be used with modern desktops. This is particularly important with the likes of Discord, Slack, Visual Studio Code, and many otehr Electron apps out there.
Since late September, Electron followed Chromium’s lead in defaulting to Wayland. But not all of Electron’s APIs are available under Wayland and some features not behaving quite the same as on other platforms. But some capabilities do work better on Wayland than X11 such as for color / HDR, transparency, and hardware-accelerated rendering.
As of last month, there is also now a Wayland test job in Electron’s CI for helping to ensure the Wayland support doesn’t regress. Moving forward there are also new possibilities for Electron apps on Wayland such as around client side decorations.
Those wishing to learn more about the modern Wayland support by Electron can see this tech talk blog post outlining the recent work in improving Wayland support.
