Gnome 3.10 on Wayland

Gnome 3.10 has initial Wayland support and hit the Arch Linux repositories lately, time to give it a try! The gnome packages are available with Wayland support, namely gnome-shell (which includes the gnome-shell-wayland binary) and mutter-wayland.

But I soon realized, that running Gnome on Wayland using Arch is not possible without some work: Firing up mutter-launch with the gnome-shell-wayland, lead to this error:

$ CLUTTER_BACKEND=wayland mutter-launch --verbose -- gnome-shell-wayland --wayland
...
(gnome-shell-wayland:18781): mutter-ERROR **: Spurious exit of X Wayland server

Gnome (or more specific, mutter, the Gnome window manager/compositor) needs a working XWayland version. XWayland is a X-Server running as a Wayland client. Its only used for non Wayland compatible clients, but is a mandatory requirement for mutter right now. The X-Server in the Arch repositories does not support this mode, hence another package is necessary. Read more »