Linux Windowing Environment

On Linux Blender supports both X11 and Wayland for official releases.

When Wayland is detected, it is the preferred system, otherwise X11 will be used.

Hint

The current «Windowing Environment» is listed in File ‣ About.

X11

This is the windowing environment that has been used most widely on Linux & Unix systems.

There are no near-term plans to deprecate or remove X11 support.

Wayland

Support for Wayland is a more recent addition, so there may be configurations that have not been tested yet. Please report a bug if you experience problems.

Blender has been tested with Gnome-Shell (mutter), KDE (plasma) & SWAY (wlroots) based compositors.

Requirements

Gnome-Shell

Under Gnome-Shell the libdecor library is required. This is available as a package on most Linux distribution.

If the library isn’t found X11 will be used as a fallback.

Troubleshooting

Detailed Wayland output can help to track down problems. Launch Blender from the command-line with additional arguments:

Blender’s Wayland Logging

blender --log "ghost.wl.*" --log-level 2

Wayland Built-In Logging

WAYLAND_DEBUG=1 blender

Disable Wayland (forcing X11)

WAYLAND_DISPLAY="" blender

Known Limitations

NVidia GPU

Currently NVidia drivers don’t fully support features needed for Wayland support, graphical glitches and flickering is a common problem, this is not specific to Blender so NVidia users may want to use X11 until driver support improves.

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Feature Comparison

Feature	X11	Wayland	Notes
Smooth Scroll	✗	✓	Smooth scrolling with track-pads.
Multi-Touch Gestures	✗	✓	Track-pad and tablet support for pinch to zoom, pan and orbit.
Reliable Cursor Warping	✗ *1	✓	Cursor warping is used while transforming and orbiting the viewport for e.g.
Window Positioning	✓	✗ *2	Needed for dragging between windows and restoring window positions on file load.
Window Raise/Lower	✓	✗ *2	Used to bring the render window to the foreground.

Other features which both systems support such as Hi-DPI, 3D-mouse, tablet input, … etc. have been left out of this list.

^*1 In X11 fast cursor motion may exit the window bounds while the cursor is grabbed (transforming for e.g.).

^*2 Wayland doesn’t support setting the window position & depth, as this is a design decision it’s unlikely to be supported (see issues for position and depth).