JetBrains has announced that native Wayland support will be enabled in its IntelliJ-based IDEs starting with version 2026.1, letting Linux developers work without X11 compatibility layers.
Moving its development suite away from legacy X11 is necessary now that major desktop environments and distributions (including Ubuntu) only officially run on or support Wayland out-of-the-box. Wayland support gas been available in preview in 2024.
JetBrains?
IntelliJ IDEA is the flagship of the JetBrains suite, use for Java and Kotlin development.
IDEA is free to install and use on Linux but some features (including AI ones) do require a paid subscription. This can be unlocked in-app.
If you run IntelliJ IDEs on Ubuntu right now it likes runs through XWayland, the compatibility layer that allows legacy apps to run on Wayland desktops.
While that bridge is functional, matching old X11 protocols on modern compositors often results in visual quirks like blurry text on HiDPI displays or fractional scaling inconsistencies.
It can cause issues with input methods, including drag and drop, which isn’t ideal given, y’know, it’s an IDE…
By switching to a native Wayland toolkit (WLToolkit), JetBrains’ IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and WebStorm will now community directly with underlying display protocol, resolving most of the long-standing issues that irritated developers.
However, there will be some differences to X11 that JetBrains’ note. As window placement is controlled solely by Wayland the IDE can’t dictate where dialogs appear on screen, remote workflows still use X11, and window decorations may not match custom themes.
X11 support is still available
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.