Wayland support in Nemo Desktop

[Sunderland93]

Hello. Right now nemo-desktop is launched through Xwayland, like ,an other Cinnamon's processes (xlsclients shows all processes running through Xwayland). Some other file managers with the ability to provide desktop mode (e.g. Caja or PCManFM-Qt) is uses layer-shell Wayland protocol (through gtk-layer-shell). Since Muffin doesn't support this protocol, and there is an attempt to add layer-shell support in Nemo which in turn was rejected, Nemo should add support for launching a desktop similar to what is used in Gnome. So is there any plan to add this?

[mtwebster]

Eventually I'd prefer implementing gtk-layer-shell eventually but for now running under Xwayland is fine for us. I think a shell extension is used now in gnome-shell, I'm not really a fan of making this part of Cinnamon.

[Sunderland93]

gtk-layer-shell will require much larger changes than backporting some shell code from GNOME, but in the long term I agree with you. Running nemo-desktop under Xwayland is only a temporary workaround, but it already causes noticeable problems:

• HiDPI and per-monitor scaling are unreliable, often producing blurry or incorrectly sized icons.
• A crash in Xwayland will take down the entire desktop.
• Xwayland adds unnecessary performance overhead.

I am currently working on direct scanout for Wayland clients, which will also serve as groundwork for implementing per-output refresh rates, atomic modesetting, and the presentation-time protocol. However, I am not sure if this will work well with a desktop running on Xwayland.