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The Linux I always wanted: LabWC with real Wayland blur

Luigi

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The Linux I always wanted: LabWC with real Wayland blur

I've been after this setup for a long time and it finally works. LabWC, Noctalia shell, and a terminal with actual blur behind it, done through Wayland itself instead of dragging X11 back in.

The Linux ecosystem is fantastic. Open source, freedom, modularity. The catch is that sometimes the different pieces have to line up before any of it can happen, and Wayland is exactly where that gets hard.

There's a Wayland protocol table that shows which features each compositor actually supports. KWin covers the most. LabWC supports fewer protocols, so blur and transparency in Noctalia simply aren't there. The old workaround was XWayland, but enable it and inertial scrolling and other newer features break. Not much of a trade.

So I patched both sides myself:

The Alacritty part is worth knowing about: its blur implementation only talked to KWin, so anyone on another compositor was out of luck. Supporting the official Wayland path means implementing the background effect manager, which is what these patches do.

I won't pretend upstream will merge them. I wrote the patches with AI assistance, I didn't want to go through the review process, and honestly I care about the license more than the surrounding philosophy. If they get accepted, great. If not, the code is on GitHub either way.

For Arch-based distros I packaged the result: labwc-blur replaces the stock LabWC, and alacritty-blur carries the background effect patch plus inertial scrolling. Recompile, enable opacity and scrolling in the settings, and you have the setup.