GNOME 3.34 Works Out Refined XWayland Support For X11 Apps Run Under Sudo

GNOME 3.34 continues to look like an incredibly great release in the performance department as well as for Wayland users.

Earlier this summer, support was added to GNOME's Mutter to generate an Xauth file and passing it to XWayland when starting. The focus of that Red Hat contribution was for allowing X.Org/X11 applications to be run under XWayland as sudo. Up to this point when using sudo with an X11 app on Wayland, it hasn't worked out but this addition for GNOME 3.34 corrects that behavior.

Landing on Monday though was a change to Mutter by Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan to its XWayland code for adding the local user to xhost. This allows the X11 clients to now work from a different VT without any extra environment variables set besides the DISPLAY. In other words, the same user on the same system can now more easily run clients with XWayland thanks to this commit coming late in the 3.34 cycle.

Separately, on Monday, another Clutter performance optimization landed in Mutter.

GNOME 3.34 is expected to be released on 11 September as another big step forward for the GNOME Shell + Mutter and related applications.