Enable wayland through config or environment variable

Your use case

Even if the wayland backend is considered experimental, the only way I know to actually enable Wayland support with Element is to pass the required command line arguments.

What would you like to do?

Setting Electron’s backend to Ozone with wayland support from a configuration file and/or from an environment variable.

Why would you like to do it?

In restricted environments like containers or flatpak, overriding command line arguments cannot be easily done: those extra arguments become necessary boilerplate. Config files and env vars can be passed down easily/selectively to containers.

In general Linux, permanent wayland support requires creating a custom .desktop file (in addition to the existing one) and aliases in the shell or defining a custom bash script passing down the flags. Config files and env vars would behave like a “set once and forget” configuration without having to go through the effort duplication we have to go through today.

How would you like to achieve it?

A config file (either reading the “standard” $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/electron-flags.conf or custom) and/or an environment variable (like ELEMENT_WAYLAND_EXPERIMENTAL=1) would improve wayland user experience at a tiny programming cost.

Have you considered any alternatives?

• Creating a custom element bash script.
• Adding aliases to my shell (or in general shell config if it should apply to all users).
• Providing an additional custom .desktop file, making sure I pinned the “right” one.

All these are partial answers: they don’t cover all the usecases so they need to be all present.

Additional context

No response

[DashieTM]

@DashieTM https://github.com/vector-im/element-desktop/blob/develop/package.json#L72

We don’t create the desktop file even for the debian release, its created by electron-builder

That’s actually perfect! I just tested the --ozone-platform-hint=auto, it works as intended! It picked up that I have wayland and automatically switched to it.

With the electron builder we can ship this flag with the following setting:

Here the full string on the .desktop file:

[gdonval]

I’m not the one who did the nvidia thing. That’s already there. 😃

Decoration, absolutely but also webrtc (if still needed)!

On Fri, 21 Oct 2022, 17:18 Christian Glombek, @.***> wrote:

If you also want a window around the application, you’ll need to add –enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations:

Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=/app/bin/element --file-forwarding im.riot.Riot --ozone-platform-hint=auto --enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations @@u %U @@

This is absolutely something that eventually should land in the flatpak repo, but it might still be too early to try it again, as there still are bugs especially when moving the window between hidpi and lowdpi displays. Also @gdonval https://github.com/gdonval: Ut probably didn’t help that there was another unrelated nvidia change in the same PR.

I’ll wait a few weeks to see how --ozone-platform-hint=auto –enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations stabilizes, and will then open a new PR.

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