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

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

Wayland Built-In Logging

  1. WAYLAND_DEBUG=1 blender

Disable Wayland (forcing X11)

  1. WAYLAND_DISPLAY="" blender

Disable libdecor (forcing borderless windows under Gnome-Shell)

Uninstall libdecor, then run Blender with an empty X11 display variable.

  1. DISPLAY="" blender

Environment Variables

XCURSOR_THEME

The cursor theme to use (must refer to a locally installed cursor).

XCURSOR_SIZE

The cursor size, defaults to 28, you may wish to increase the size on Hi-DPI displays.

Known Limitations

Gnome Shell’s Fractional Scaling (before version 44)

Versions of Gnome-Shell prior to 44 don’t fully support fractional scaling.

Using fractional under older versions of Gnome-Shell may result in glitches such as a small cursor size.

NVidia GPU

Currently NVidia drivers don’t fully support features needed for Wayland. Graphical glitches and flickering are common problems. In some cases, there can be crashes on startup. This is not specific to Blender, so NVidia users may want to use X11 until driver support improves.

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.

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, as this is a design decision it’s unlikely to be supported (see issues for position).