KiCad and tiling windows managers - i3, xmonad (maybe sway, Hyprland)

[Zucca]

After too many years in Windows, now it is finally time to jump on the Linux boat.

Yes I read this:
https://www.kicad.org/help/system-requirements/

so I will avoid Wayland for now (feel free to disagree with me by dropping a post below...  )

Now my lazy choice would be XFCE and done, move on...
That said the tilting tiling windows managers are very attracting stuff for me.

Kindly asking for some user feedback about KiCad used in i3 and/or Xmonad... basically a tilting tiling windows manager in X11.

Thanks in advance for your support.

PS: I will be also extremely interested if you are a Wayland user and run KiCad... even more for sway or the hotter Hyprland.

[JPortici]

I run kicad on debian trixie with kde, wayland session, and i do not care for window managers.
No crashes, no issues, only thing i had to change was the "GTK Theme" in system settings -> global theme -> configure GNOME/GTK style, but that's related to KDE and not wayland

the only real wayland issue i have is that the window doesn't retain size/position (not a problem if you maximize) but that's a common wayland problem

Edit: I don't have most of the problems people claim to have with KDE and wayland (krashes, slowness, ...) may be due to me using Debian and probably also iGPUs from Intel/AMD. I haven't had a computer with a dedicated GPU since 2010

[Zucca]

Interesting and somehow expected.

I found several (emotional) online discussion where Wayland users were getting angry on KiCad position "avoid Wayland for now please..." .
(Ahhh the eternal discussion X11 vs Wayland)

That said I found very few hits on the topic tilting tiling managers and KiCad. That's what pushed me to open a thread here.

[voltsandjolts]

I think you mean 'tiling window manager', as in 'tile-ing', not 'tilting'.

Using tilted windows would be quite dizzying, even more so than compiz 

[Zucca]

  so sorry.

My brain tilted...

[JPortici]

Interesting and somehow expected.

I found several (emotional) online discussion where Wayland users were getting angry on KiCad position "avoid Wayland for now please..." .
(Ahhh the eternal discussion X11 vs Wayland)

That said I found very few hits on the topic tilting tiling managers and KiCad. That's what pushed me to open a thread here.

yeah, like init.d vs systemd.
Sorry but systemd init scripts are much more easier to manage and debug for me, a not-poweruser.
Wayland just works for my use cases, RDP works like a charm, i don't care about the edge cases and give zero shit about VRR and other gamer bullshit. The only thing that bother me is the wayland-can't-position-windows by desing which is so incredibly stupid, but again not a real dealbreaker for me.

Kicad's position is like kde's position of closing automatically bug requests coming from debian users (because we are bound to use outdated versions): they don't want to be blamed for other people's mistakes.
I just wanted to point that out.

[abeyer]

I think you mean 'tiling window manager', as in 'tile-ing', not 'tilting'.

Using tilted windows would be quite dizzying, even more so than compiz 

Pretty sure someone did that as a April 1 software launch once.

[abeyer]

Sorry but systemd init scripts are much more easier to manage and debug for me, a not-poweruser.

the scripts were never the problem w/ systemd... but upstart's were nicer yet, anyway.

i don't care about the edge cases and give zero shit about VRR and other gamer bullshit.

There's still lots of non-gaming stuff that's a worse experience, at best, if not outright broken. The experience with multiple monitors and scaling is still atrocious when I looked, where scaling seems to be applied or not applied almost randomly in different scenarios resulting in wacky sizing and/or blurry images.

[Doctorandus_P]

That said the tilting tiling windows managers are very attracting stuff for me.

Just curious, have you ever found a titillating window manager?

, and i do not care for window managers.

That also sums up my general interest in window managers, but a titillating window manager may change that.

[Zucca]

Well, I will give a try myself and report back what I saw.

[scottapotamas]

I've been seriously using KiCAD 8 and 9 on Hyprland with no issues on both a desktop (nVidia, 32in 4k monitor) and laptop (AMD integrated, 14in 2.8k) with no issues to speak of. I've worked with a few people using KiCAD without issues on wayland enabled Debian derivative distros as well.

Back in mid-late 2024 (2yrs ago) I had some compat issues between a specific nVidia driver version and KiCAD 7?. But it's easy enough to force KiCAD to run in xwayland as a fallback if needed for some reason.

Obviously configuration and behaviour can vary, but a lot of the KiCAD related concern and discussion is at least a year or two out of date at this point.

[geegor]

I run KiCad just fine on wayland with both Cosmic and Niri tiling desktops. No different than any other x11 software, at least in my experience. Good luck on your Linux journey!

[Reece]

I found several (emotional) online discussion where Wayland users were getting angry on KiCad position "avoid Wayland for now please..." .

The KiCad developers are not biased against Wayland. They are simply advising that many users encounter problems when using Wayland that do not arise when using X11.

Some of these problems are because Wayland doesn't yet support decades-old interfaces, and in some cases intentionally breaks them. Others arise from problems in the WxWidgets toolkit support for Wayland and can only be fixed by updates to WxWidgets. KiCad devs cannot fix these problems.

If KiCad with Wayland works for you, that's great. If not, you're aware of the situation.

[SiliconWizard]

Oh no, they are not biased against Wayland, they just don't care.

Now yes, KiCad depends on a number of third-party libraries that are the culprit. KiCad in itself is rather display server-agnostic. The problem is with wxWidgets. But I'm not sure the average user cares about the underlying reason.

Anyway, KiCad has been working fine for me on Wayland, but to get the best experience you should run it with the env. variable: "GDK_BACKEND=x11". Then it goes through XWayland and that's alright as it is.

But the dependency on third-party libraries that handle the GUI parts, and that are now from a old code base, makes it increasingly likely that something will break eventually for Wayland, if it hasn't broken already.

[Doctorandus_P]

Instead of speculation, read this:

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

And Wayland (apparently) not supporting window positioning by the program by design feels like a bit of an absurd choice to me.

Also, KiCad uses wxWidgets for it's multi platform support. It's not the most "advanced" or "modern" graphics library, but it gets the job done. KiCad is also sponsoring the wxWidgets project to implement new features.

[light655]

I'm currently running KiCad 9 on Debian 13 with GNOME and Wayland. It's been running pretty well without crashing, even with fractional scaling. Everything is sharp and responsive.
The only annoying issue is that sometimes my cursor "jumps" to the bottom right corner when I paste or move objects. This happens occasionally in both the schematic editor and PCB editor.

However, I was on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (GNOME and Wayland) just a month ago and KiCad was not doing well.
The display will be blurry if fractional scaling is enabled. If I open the schematic editor and PCB editor side by side, KiCad will freeze for half a second whenever I select an object on either of them. Also, crashes are frequent.

I would suggest avoiding this version of Ubuntu for KiCad. I have no idea why it got so many issues with KiCad, even though it was based on Debian???

[Karel]

The only annoying issue is that sometimes my cursor "jumps" to the bottom right corner when I paste or move objects. This happens occasionally in both the schematic editor and PCB editor.

Cursor/pointer warping: Essential for many CAD operations, it is conditionally available in some Wayland implementations, depending on support for optional protocol extensions

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

The people behind wayland believe that an application should not be able to move/warp the mouse pointer 
Something that has always been working fine for many years on Mac, X11 and windows...

[SiliconWizard]

It works fine if running KiCad with "GDK_BACKEND=x11". I can't guarantee that it will work with your own exact setup on Wayland, but as far as I'm concerned, it has worked on numerous different setups.

TO test that, you can run kicad from the command line with:

GDK_BACKEND=x11 kicad

If you have a desktop file for KiCad, just add this environment variable in the desktop file.

[SiliconWizard]

Instead of speculation, read this:

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

And Wayland (apparently) not supporting window positioning by the program by design feels like a bit of an absurd choice to me.

Also, KiCad uses wxWidgets for it's multi platform support. It's not the most "advanced" or "modern" graphics library, but it gets the job done. KiCad is also sponsoring the wxWidgets project to implement new features.

What speculations? This was 100% facts and nothing else. KiCad devs effectively don't want to care about Wayland, I was not judging whether this is justified or not. Just the way it is, and yes, they have reasons for that since they depend on other projects that are the culprit. And yes, switching to a different GUI toolkit (such as Qt) would be a major endeavor - it may take years to get done. Not blaming them for not even thinking about it for now.

I've been using KiCad professionally for several years and on Linux for 2-3 years. I know it upside down. I have also known and followed the project since the early 2000's.

Yes, the problem on Wayland is due to wxWidgets not supporting Wayland fully. And yes, wxWidgets is an old library. Meaning that everything relies heavily on X11 and is now very hard to adapt to Wayland. Quite logical.

The situation with Wayland in general is completely disfunctional. It has become default on most major distros, it's overall pretty good, but yes, there are some things that it has decided will never be implemented because they are considered unsafe. Due to that, everybody is putting the blame on the next one and nothing is moving forward.

It *is* possible to force window positioning and do cursor warping on Wayland, but just not through the display server itself. I think it has to be done on the window compositor level, and that's what some DEs do. That's also why it works through XWayland - proof that it can be done. It just requires a complete change of approach for it, and that's a major endeavor for existing GUI toolkits, and may depend on which DE/compositor it runs, which is, admittedly, a completely royal pain.

As I said above, until things change if they ever do, just run KiCad through XWayland. To this end, setting GDK_BACKEND=x11 does the job and you get back normal operation, including window positioning and cursor "warping".

I'll be interested to hear about people for whom it doesn't work - please report your distro, GPU and desktop environment.
Of course, make sure you have installed XWayland. If it's not available on your particular setup, then you'll effectively be out of luck.

[light655]

Cursor warping used to work fine on KiCad (on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ironically).
Now, on Debian 13, the place it decides to jump to is kind of arbitrary. Instead of moving the window to centre around the cursor, the cursor jumps to somewhere else.
I have to disable it in KiCad unfortunately. At least the application doesn't crash all the time .

[Karel]

Wayland’s Never-Ending Opposition To Multi-Window Positioning

https://hackaday.com/2025/11/11/waylands-never-ending-opposition-to-multi-window-positioning/


They closed the issue because too many people complained about wayland:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/264

[Karel]

Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!

https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277

[JPortici]

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/264

am i reading it wrong, or it is actually going forward this time?

Also https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/18

[Karel]

am i reading it wrong, or it is actually going forward this time?

Indeed, they re-opened the discussion a month ago.
Maybe, after another couple of years, wayland will be finally onpar with X11...

I just don't understand why gnome and kde are pushing to a new protocol/implementation that it isn't ready yet... 
I guess they need guinea pigs for testing 
Well, I'll stick with Linux Mint Cinnamon and avoid all the troubles related to the transition to wayland for as long as possible (which will be at least untill april 2029).