For the Trixie port, removing Xwayland does not look possible without switching to a resource-heavy desktop environment or using hacks:
- There seem to be very few desktops that are fully ready for Wayland in Debian Trixie. GNOME is ready, KDE is ready, LXQt is ready enough (still some rough edges but they can mostly be papered over). XFCE is missing critical functionality and is too buggy. Cinnamon and Budgie are likely too immature and are potentially resource-heavy anyway. So in practical terms, it’s LXQt or nothing if we want to port to Wayland for Trixie.
- LXQt supports quite a few compositors (Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri), but of those, KWin is a resource-heavy KDE component, and everything other than labwc and wayfire are beginner-unfriendly tiling compositors. Wayfire does not appear to support software rendering in Trixie, making it unusable in VirtualBox at least in my initial testing, so we’re limited to labwc (which is the recommended compositor for LXQt anyway).
- labwc in Trixie is unable to start without XWayland installed: Degrade gracefully when built with xwayland support but it isn't available during runtime · Issue #434 · labwc/labwc · GitHub Attempting to remove Xwayland and start labwc results in:
The only options I can see moving forward are:
- Allow XWayland but attempt to restrict all apps to using Wayland instead of X if possible
- Attempt to kill XWayland after session start and hope it doesn’t come back
- Replace XWayland with some dummy binary that can fool labwc into thinking it’s there
Further research into making a fake XWayland binary will probably occur, but we should be ready for this to not work.
Also, spice-vdagent (which provides clipboard sharing and mouse integration under KVM) requires XWayland to be running in order to function. Theoretically we could document how to enable XWayland for users who depend on those features, but in general, not having them is a serious usability issue. (We’re facing similar issues with VirtualBox, which still needs investigation.)