JetBrains has announced that native Wayland support will be enabled in its IntelliJ-based IDEs starting with version 2026.1, allowing Linux developers to work without X11 compatibility layers.

Making the development suite work without depending on X11 is increasingly a priority now that major desktop environments and distributions (such as Ubuntu) only officially run on or support Wayland.

Not that IntelliJ’s Wayland support is new – it’s been available in preview in 2024.

If you run IntelliJ IDEs on Ubuntu right now, it likely runs through XWayland, a compatibility layer that allows legacy X11 apps to run on Wayland desktops.

JetBrains?

IntelliJ IDEA is the flagship of the JetBrains suite, popularly used for Java and Kotlin development.

IDEA is free to install and run on Linux, but some features (like AI) do require a paid subscription. You can unlock that in-app.

That bridge is functional, but using old protocols on modern compositors often involves tradeoffs, like blurry text on HiDPI displays or fractional scaling inconsistencies.

It also causes issues with input methods and including drag and drop interactions.

In adopting a native Wayland toolkit (WLToolkit), JetBrains’ IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and WebStorm will now community directly with underlying display protocol, fixing many long-standing issues that have irritated developers using it on Linux.

However, it won’t be perfect. There will be a few differences with the Wayland backend, as JetBrains’ note. As window placement is controlled by Wayland the IDE can’t decide where dialogs open on screen, remote workflows still need X11, and window decorations may not match.

X11 support is still included in IntelliJ 2026.1

Before any developers panic, let me state that JetBrains IDEs will continue to run on X11; the suite is not going Wayland-only, just defaulting to Wayland where possible.

A new “auto” detection setting in the JetBrains Runtime will attempt to connect to Wayland first. If that connection fails, it reverts to using the XToolkit for X11 compatibility.

Developers can revert to the X11 backend by adding -Dawt.toolkit.name=XToolkit to the IDE’s custom VM options. This will continue to run the app as an X11 client on Wayland via XWayland or, obviously, natively on X11/Xorg.

A lot of Java-based apps are dependant on X11. This effort by JetBrains is part of a wider industry push led by OpenJDK (called Project Wakefield) to improve Wayland support across the Java ecosystem.

Ubuntu users can install IntelliJ IDEA and other tools in the JetBrains family from the Snap Store.