Running Ubuntu 22.04 with the default Wayland session? You can switch your web browser’s backend to get even faster and smoother experience.
Firefox, Google Chrome and Chromium based web browsers do have native Wayland support, but they still use X11 as backend in Ubuntu desktop.
Since Ubuntu 22.04 by default logs into Wayland session, user can also change the web browser’s backend to get faster and smoother browsing experiences. I didn’t run any benchmark. But after switching to Wayland, my browser now has:
obviously better touchpad scrolling
2-finger spread/pinch gestures to zoom in/out
Enable Wayland for Chrome/Chromium
For Google Chrome, Chromium and their based web browsers, e.g., Edge, Vivaldi, just type chrome://flags/ in address bar and hit Enter.
When the page opens, search for Preferred Ozone platform and use the dropdown menu to set it value to “Wayland“. Finally, click “Relaunch” button to apply change by restarting the web browser.
Chrome enable wayland
Native Wayland for Firefox
Since Firefox 121.0, it uses Wayland by default if available, but NOT for pre-installed Firefox Snap package in my case.
To enable it for Snap package, either open terminal and start Firefox with Wayland from terminal:
env MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 /snap/bin/firefox
Or, open “Files” (Nautilus file browser), press Ctrl+H then find out and edit the .profile file.
When the file opens in text editor, add the line below in the end and save it.
export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
To apply the change, you need to log out and back in.
Looking for how to record Ubuntu desktop in Wayland session? Here’s how to do it in Ubuntu 21.10 using Kooha.
Ubuntu switched to “Wayland” session since Ubuntu 21.04. However, many apps, e.g., Kazam, Peek and vokoscreen-NG, do not support it. Some apps including OBS-Studio claim to support for Wayland, but either record blank screen or just refuse to work!
The best solution in my opinion is switch back to Xorg session. To do so, simply log out, select your user and then choose “Ubuntu on Xorg” via bottom-right gear button menu. All the apps will work once you login with Xorg.
The simple screen recorder allows to capture the full-screen, selected app window, and a selection screen area. It saves video into WebM, MP4, GIF, and MKV formats.
The steps below is only recommended for Ubuntu 21.10 which has properly Pipewire support that is required by Kooha.
1. Setup Flatpak daemon:
The app is available to install as Flatpak package. So you have to first make sure he flatpak daemon is installed. Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal, then run command:
sudo apt install flatpak
Next, add the flathub repository by running command in terminal:
After that, run the command below in terminal to install the screencast app:
flatpak install flathub io.github.seadve.Kooha
Upgrade the Pipewire service:
Kooha requires pipewire server, xdg-desktop-portal, and WebRTC (Firefox). There are properly installed and enabled in Ubuntu 21.10 out-of-the-box (at least in my case). The recorder somehow refuses to work with built-in pipewire, but the updated package from this Ubuntu PPA will make it work!
1.) Firstly, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal. Then run command to add the PPA:
Type user password when it asks (no asterisk feedback) and hit Enter to continue.
2.) Next, either run sudo apt upgrade to upgrade all system packages or use apt command to install the audio & video server:
sudo apt install pipewire
Finally, restart your computer.
Start recording via Kooha:
In the next boot, search for and open Kooha from activities overview screen. When it opens, toggle recording system sound, microphone, mouse cursor, and finally click on “Record” button.
It will pop-up the dialog to either choose full-screen. You need to click the “Built-in display” or other monitor (if any) and then click “Share” to start recording.
Record full-screen – Need to click select display
Or, choose “Single Window” and select between all opened app windows.
Kooha record app window
When recording starts, the app window counts up with button to stop. Though it also has keyboard shortcut Ctrl+R to toggle record.
How to Uninstall Kooha:
To remove the Kooha screen recorder app, open terminal and run command:
Found that your desktop screen recording applications do not launch in Ubuntu 17.10 default Wayland session?
Well, try Green Recorder, the first desktop program to support Wayland display server on GNOME session.
Green Recorder is a GTK+ 3 application written in Python that features:
Record audio and video on almost all Linux interfaces.
Support mkv, avi, mp4, wmv, gif and nut (only WebM for Wayland)
A play button to play last recorded video.
Right-click system tray icon to stop recording.
Choose the audio input source from list.
Run command after recording.
How to Install Green Recorder in Ubuntu 17.10:
The latest Green Recorder 3.0.5 features a lot of small fixes and restrcutered UI. You can install it in Ubuntu 17.10, and Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 17.04 via its official PPA.
1. Open terminal either via Ctrl+Alt+T or by searching ‘terminal’ from app launcher. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossproject/ppa
Input your password (no visual feedback while typing) when it prompts and hit Enter.
2. Then run commands to check repository packages and install the recorder:
Ubuntu 17.10 uses Wayland in the default session and Xorg for optional. However, many graphical applications need to run as root so far does not launch in Wayland.
You’ll get following similar errors while running graphical applications via root:
For some applications, e.g., Synaptic Package Manager, Grub Customizer, Gparted, and Ubuntu Tweak, they does not launch in Wayland.
Or you may get following error when trying to launch them via gksu command:
Failed to run *** as user root. Unable to copy the user’s Xauthorization file.
Starting graphical application via sudo in terminal window will get error:
No protocol specified. Gtk-WARNING **: Cannot open display: :0
The most straightforward workaround is to use xhost to temporarily allow the root user to access the local user’s X session.
To do so, run command:
xhost si:localuser:root
After running the command, these graphical applications can be launched from app launcher or via sudo, gksu, pkexec commands until you log out.
To make this work automatically at login, search for and launch Startup Applications utility, click the “Add” button to run the command at startup:
Daily builds of Wayland and Weston are now available in PPA for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and Ubuntu 15.04.
Thanks to Bryce Harrington, a former Canonical developer who continues to be heavily involved in Wayland development, he has created an automatic builds PPA to make it easy to try out the newest Wayland/Weston code on Ubuntu.
To get started, open terminal from the Dash, App launcher, or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, do below steps:
1. To add the PPA, paste below command in terminal and run:
3. Now you should be able to start Weston within X by running command weston, which provides a Terminal along with a basic window manager functionality.
If you want you can create & edit weston.ini file via below command:
gedit ~/.config/weston.ini
Change its appearances by adding some settings like this page. Finally the weston window looks like:
4. To running Gnome Shell session on Wayland, run command:
sudo apt-get install gnome-session-wayland
Then log out and select “Gnome on Wayland” in gdm login screen:
If you’re using the default LightDM display manager, you may have to do :
Install Gnome Shell if don’t have Gnome session:
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
If you’ve installed Gnome-Shell but still using LightDM, run command to select gdm:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
Finally restart your computer and you should see the gdm login screen as above picture shows.
Wayland is a protocol that specifies the communication between the display server (called Wayland compositor) and its clients. It is intended as a simpler replacement for X.
Wayland and Weston 1.3 has been released a few hours ago. See what’s new in this release:
More pixel formats for wl_shm (Tomeu Vizoso). We can now create RGB565 (and many more) shm surfaces and a compositor can indicate which ones it supports.
Doc work (Peter Hutterer, Bryce Harrington, Aaron Faanes). Much work on the doc build system from Peter and general wording and grammer improvements all around.
Multi resource support (Rob Bradford). Rob added support for dealing with lsits of resources which the weston side multi-resource fix builds on.
Support for language bindings (Jason Ekstrand). After a long time and many detours into fixing other parts of Wayland and Weston, Jason finally landed the language binding support. This feature lets you bind a higher level language to libwayland-client/server by providing custom dispatch functions.
Release requests for wl_pointer, wl_keyboard and wl_touch (Rob Bradford). We don’t have a way for a client to deregister its interest in receiving input events, we just drop them on the client side when the client destroys the proxy. With the release requests, we now have a way to stop the server from sending them in the first place.
Install the wayland.xml protocol defintion (Jason Ekstrand). We now install the core Wayland XML protocol definition in a public location. Language bindings can parse this to generate code or bind dynamically. This also introduces a well known protocol directory where other projects can install protocol files.
Very few bug fixes in this release. There was only a couple of actual bug fixes this time around, which again is a sign that core wayland is settling down.
