XWayland

XWayland is the bridging mechanism between legacy Xorg programs and Wayland compositors.

HiDPI XWayland

XWayland currently looks pixelated on HiDPI screens, due to Xorg’s inability to scale.

This problem is mitigated by the xwayland:force_zero_scaling option, which forces XWayland windows not to be scaled.

This will get rid of the pixelated look, but will not scale applications properly. To do this, each toolkit has its own mechanism.

# change monitor to high resolution, the last argument is the scale factor
monitor = , highres, auto, 2

# unscale XWayland
xwayland {
  force_zero_scaling = true
}

# toolkit-specific scale
env = GDK_SCALE,2
env = XCURSOR_SIZE,32

The GDK_SCALE variable won’t conflict with Wayland-native GTK programs.

Abstract Unix domain socket

X11 applications use Unix domain sockets to communicate with XWayland. On Linux, libX11 prefers to use the abstract Unix domain socket. This type of socket uses a separate, abstract namespace that is independent of the host filesystem. This makes abstract sockets more flexible but harder to isolate for some kinds of sandboxes like Flatpak. However, removing the abstract socket has potential security and compatibility issues.

Keeping that in mind, we add the xwayland:create_abstract_socket option. When the abstract socket is disabled, only the regular Unix domain socket will be created.

* Abstract Unix domain sockets are available only on Linux-based systems