There's this whole article about KiCad being broken on Wayland... but apparently it's all just a distro packaging problem???
https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/
The article doesn't mention XWayland at all, but KiCad works perfectly under XWayland as far as I can tell, and that is the default on at least Fedora! wxwidgets (the toolkit KiCad uses) is still flaky under native Wayland apparently, but it is perfectly okay to keep using XWayland for now, and you should! Apps and toolkits should not switch the default backend to Wayland until all major regressions are fixed, that's kind the whole reason why XWayland exists!
If you are on a distro that enables KiCad Wayland support by default and you experience the issues in that blog post, you don't need to (and probably should not) switch to an X11 session. Just launch KiCad as GDK_BACKEND=x11 kicad and it should run under XWayland just as well as it does under X11 sessions.
Some distros are dropping support for the legacy Xorg server and X11-native sessions, but nobody is dropping support for X11 apps and XWayland, and nobody should be concerned about running apps in X11 mode for as long as it's needed!
https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/
The article doesn't mention XWayland at all, but KiCad works perfectly under XWayland as far as I can tell, and that is the default on at least Fedora! wxwidgets (the toolkit KiCad uses) is still flaky under native Wayland apparently, but it is perfectly okay to keep using XWayland for now, and you should! Apps and toolkits should not switch the default backend to Wayland until all major regressions are fixed, that's kind the whole reason why XWayland exists!
If you are on a distro that enables KiCad Wayland support by default and you experience the issues in that blog post, you don't need to (and probably should not) switch to an X11 session. Just launch KiCad as GDK_BACKEND=x11 kicad and it should run under XWayland just as well as it does under X11 sessions.
Some distros are dropping support for the legacy Xorg server and X11-native sessions, but nobody is dropping support for X11 apps and XWayland, and nobody should be concerned about running apps in X11 mode for as long as it's needed!
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