virtualbox.org

Do we have drivers for Wayland inside LinuxGA ?

Not really - Wayland only VMs get very limited functionality (no clipboard sharing, no DnD), and even resizing usually doesn't work because in most Wayland desktops there is no way to set the resolution (other than through the associated settings dialog, which usually doesn't allow arbitrary resolutions) and therefore the resizing of the VM window can't establish a new resolution within the VM. This is just slowly evolving, needing work on the desktop side.

klaus wrote:Wayland only VMs [...]

What is supposed to (not) work with XWayland then?

klaus wrote:Not really - Wayland only VMs get very limited functionality (no clipboard sharing, no DnD), and even resizing usually doesn't work because in most Wayland desktops there is no way to set the resolution (other than through the associated settings dialog, which usually doesn't allow arbitrary resolutions) and therefore the resizing of the VM window can't establish a new resolution within the VM. This is just slowly evolving, needing work on the desktop side.

Isn't that a big deal ? Because many distributions are using Wayland or are bound to go there.

Modern GNOME desktops (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora), are running on Wayland or XWayland ? (I think not X11 anymore...)

XWayland is an X server that runs under Wayland and provides backwards compatibility for legacy X11 applications like VBoxClient (part of the VirtualBox Guest Additions).

So one important question could be: Are modern desktops using Wayland with or without XWayland?

klaus' answer targeted your question regarding the former situation, whereas my question targeted the latter.

The answer for XWayland is even more complicated, but ultimately much closer to "pure Wayland" than "proper X11". No reliable resizing (since the X11 RandR extension in XWayland is read-only, not allowing to set resolutions). Clipboard sharing is hit-and-miss (with X11 applications it should work, with Wayland ones it probably won't). With DnD I honestly have no idea what mess the Wayland devs created.

Thanks, klaus, for the detailed answer.

BTW, a fun way to tell apart X11 windows and Wayland windows is to use xeyes.