How to run Xorg programs on Wayland

Question

I am using Ubuntu Studio 17.10 with the Gnome 3 Desktop and would love to use Wayland, however, when I do I find certain programs such as Gufw will not open, and will only work under the Xorg session.

Is there a way to make Xorg only programs open on Wayland? Or is it just a case of waiting for them to make the transition themselves?

Wayland seems to be making good progress so I think it would be a shame to continue to use the older Xorg, but until I can run ALL of my programs on Wayland I will be forced to stick with Xorg.

Solution

Is there a way to make Xorg only programs open on Wayland?

Technically speaking, yes. Actually there are more Xorg programs running in your Wayland session than you think, like Google Chrome and Firefox. This is thanks to XWayland server, a backward compatibility implementation in Wayland that allows running legacy X programs in Wayland. And it is already configured in your Wayland session.

I do I find certain programs such as Gufw will not open, and will only work under the Xorg session

Note that graphical applications that need to run as root such as gufw and gparted no longer work under Wayland, as a security mesure, and therefore they won't launch with XWayland too.

There is a way to bypass this security measure and launch gufw and such applications under Wayland but its not recommended, and that's by adding root user to xhost access control list:

xhost +SI:localuser:root

To automatically launch this command in every session after login, you can refer to this answer.

Hope this answers your question about running Xorg programs on Wayland.

Comments

[sudodus]

Most graphical programs for Xorg work with Wayland, but there is a specific problem with programs that need elevated permissions. There are solutions for that problem too. See Why don't gksu/gksudo or launching a graphical application with sudo work with Wayland?.