Developing a wayland compositor on silverblue

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Hello
So far I’ve been really happy with the workflow of setting up a development environment with toolbox and getting it dialed in without stepping on the toes of another development environment. But I ran into a little snafu when I got the idea that I should try to write a wayland compositor.

I’ve created a toolbox container, installed dependencies and compilers and libraries and all that jazz. I can run my compositor and it ends up in a window on my host computer, but if I run a program through the compositor it ends up as its own window on the host computer.

I get it that silverblue is perhaps not ideal for this type of development, but it feels like it should work. Perhaps vnc or some other remote desktop solution? Anyone have any ideas or experience?

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I don’t think you can nest compositors.

You can only have one compositor running because the compositor controls the gpu’s and screens.

You could use a VM to test tour compositor where you can setup the VM with only your compositor.

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You can definitely nest compositors; for example, Weston can be run in a nested configuration, and so can others.

@smetadanarkist, check your relevant environment variables (e.g., WAYLAND_DISPLAY). I am pretty sure they are pointing to the original compositor.

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100% what Ngi said. You can run nested compositors and if you want your apps to show there you need to make sure to point them to the Wayland socket of this new one.

When you’re ready to try it in a full session on the host, you can put it in a sysext to make it easier to try.

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Hmm… I decided to use Louvre as framework and when I run the simple compositor it creates a new socket, but the windows still end up on my host computer. I think perhaps I should run in a VM so I can avoid the complexity of nested compositors.

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I could not reproduce your issue. I tried building and running LouvreTemplate compositor in a toolbox, and pressing F1 correctly launches weston-terminal within the nested compositor.