blob: ffbf4c78bd784c9fdc38a8cc5155057a899f1600 (
plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
|
+++
title = "Forcing SDL3 to actually use Wayland on Wayland."
date = 2025-08-06
updated = 2025-08-08
+++
[SDL3](https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/FrontPage) is a great platform abstraction layer. On Linux, it compiles with support for both [X Window System](https://www.x.org/wiki/) and [Wayland](https://wayland.freedesktop.org/). This is great because it makes your app compatible with just about any desktop environment and window manager.
Here's the thing. X11 apps can still run under Wayland through the XWayland compatibility layer. In the [SDL3 documentation](https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README-wayland) it says that
> Wayland is a replacement for the X11 window system protocol and architecture and is favored over X11 by default in SDL3
However, if your compositor does not implement the `wp_fifo_manager_v1` protocol SDL will fall back to XWayland. I don't know how this protocol fits into the Wayland ecosystem, but my compositor doesn't have it. Here's how I forced SDL to use Wayland anyway (for c++).
```c++
for (int i = 0; i < SDL_GetNumVideoDrivers(); i++) {
if (std::string(SDL_GetVideoDriver(i)) == "wayland") {
SDL_SetHintWithPriority(SDL_HINT_VIDEO_DRIVER, "wayland", SDL_HINT_OVERRIDE);
break;
}
}
```
This code will explicitly enable Wayland if it is available. Thanks to my friend Riley Beckett for helping figure it out.
> I [asked about this issue](https://discourse.libsdl.org/t/is-wayland-really-default) on the SDL discourse.
|
