GTK and Wayland Support

Equo Chromium runs smoothly on both the traditional GTK stack and modern Wayland desktops.

GTK

Equo Chromium supports GTK 2 and GTK 3 out of the box. At startup the correct version is selected automatically, but you can override the choice with the standard SWT variable SWT_GTK3.

Force GTK 3:

export SWT_GTK3=1

Force GTK 2:

export SWT_GTK3=0

GTK2 is not supported by all versions of SWT. If that’s the case, Equo Chromium will run with GTK3 regardless.

Wayland

Native Support

Starting from version 128.0.3, Wayland is supported natively. If your environment and distribution fully support native Wayland, Equo Chromium will use it automatically.

Running with XWayland

For earlier versions, or if you prefer to run via XWayland for compatibility, you can use one of the options below to force X11-based rendering.

1. Set an environment variable

Add this before launching your application to force the use of X11 (via XWayland):

GDK_BACKEND=x11

2. Call earlyInit() (pure Java or Eclipse RCP)

Invoke com.equo.chromium.ChromiumBrowser.earlyInit() before the SWT Display is created. This allows Chromium to initialize correctly with XWayland before GTK is loaded.

Plain Java example:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    com.equo.chromium.ChromiumBrowser.earlyInit();
    Display display = new Display();
…
}

In an Eclipse RCP app, you can do this by having your own org.eclipse.equinox.app.IApplication and calling earlyInit() from the start method:

import org.eclipse.equinox.app.IApplication;
import org.eclipse.equinox.app.IApplicationContext;

public class Application extends org.eclipse.e4.ui.internal.workbench.swt.E4Application implements IApplication { @Override public Object start(IApplicationContext context) throws Exception { com.equo.chromium.ChromiumBrowser.earlyInit(); return super.start(context); } }

Add -nosplash to the command line so Eclipse does not load GTK before earlyInit() runs.

3. Use the Equo shared library (recommended)

Add the custom launcher path to your product’s .ini file:

--launcher.library
plugins/com.equo.chromium.cef.gtk.linux.x86_64_128.0.<CHROMIUM-VERSION>/
This custom shared library detects and configures the environment automatically, including XWayland or native Wayland, depending on availability.