Wayland Breaks Lock Screen

In switching my Dell Vostro laptop from Windows 11 Pro to Linux Mint, I decided to try out the Cinnamon using Wayland (experimental) support instead of the default x11 xOrg windows manager. It's been a while, but I expected Wayland to be the effective replacement for x11 in modern Linux desktop systems.

For me, everything appeared to work. But within a few minutes, I noticed that my shortcut for locking the screen did not work. I had modified the default from Ctrl+A+L to use Windows + L (which is muscle memory for me) but assumed it was unset.

After confirming that my shortcut was still properly set (and even re-setting it) I went to the launcher to manually click the Lock Screen button - but even that did not lock the screen!

Searching around briefly online lead me to believe it was some combination of Wayland and/or NVIDIA on Linux. Since my laptop does not have a discrete GPU (I'm using the built-in i5-1235U graphics support) the only option I had was to try and turn off the Wayland experimental support in x11.

And, that was it. That was the whole problem: turn off Wayland. Still, in 2024.

Distributor ID:	Linuxmint
Description:	Linux Mint 21.3
Release:	21.3
Codename:	virginia

The only way I found to fix the Lock Screen (keyboard or launcher shortcut) was to switch back to the default x11 mode for Cinnamon.

Helpful Articles

I did find some helpful resources and have included them below, in case anyone else goes looking and accidentally finds this post.

Lock screen (`cinnamon-screensaver`) does not display when using the “Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental)” session · Issue #98 · linuxmint/wayland

Distribution EndeavourOS (rolling) Package version 6.2.2 Graphics hardware in use AMD Barcelo @ 0.40 GHz [Integrated] Frequency Always Bug description When trying to lock the screen, presumably usi…

GitHublinuxmint

WAYLAND - read this first! - Linux Mint Forums

Linux Mint ForumsPost

Issues · linuxmint/wayland

All issues related to Wayland (Cinnamon, XApp, tools etc..) - Issues · linuxmint/wayland

GitHublinuxmint

Another Perspective

Notably, if I had chosen a different Linux distribution, I might have been able to use Wayland support with no problem. An interesting perspective on compositors (and other elements) that make Wayland support difficult to implement in practice:

Wayland Isn’t Going to Save The Linux Desktop