Wayland applications

Besides the Gnome application suite (and any modern GTK, or Qt application), there are a few apps that have native Wayland support. If you want a lightweight terminal, for example, then Terminology (from the Enlightenment desktop) is a good bet, as is the popular Termite (which you’ll need to compile yourself). You could then run everything in a terminal, which earns you many geek points. For example, you can play music with ncmpcpp, browse the web with Links or manage files with MidnightCommander. That’s not everyone’s cup of tea though, so let’s continue. Screenshots used to be a Wayland bugbear, but not so with swaygrab (which is installed with the sway package). It can even capture video too. If you’re more interested in watching videos, then MPV (a popular descendant of the venerable Mplayer) works very well. There’s a nice lightweight image viewer called Imv too – ideal for Sway. SDL2 applications (which includes many games) support Wayland too, through setting the environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland .

Beside’s Gnome’s Epiphany, you’ll be hard pushed to find a (graphical) web browser that works natively in Wayland. Igalia have been working on getting Chromium working with video acceleration on Wayland for a while now, which is a serious business. If you want to try out Fedora’s unofficial FirefoxNightly and Development flatpaks, check out https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz.