JetBrains is constantly improving its Wayland support. IntelliJ 2026.1 EAP now detects if you’re running a Wayland session, and it automatically enables its Wayland support. See the related blog post from JetBrains.
Unfortunately, Wayland support (from IDEs, desktop environments and drivers) being far from perfect, you may still experience some stability or performance issues. At least, this is what I’m facing with Rider EAP on Arch Linux with a KDE desktop environment: the IDE freezes, memory is not completely freed when exiting the IDE, and performance is terribly poor. This is a bit annoying.
Nota: this issue only occurs with Rider EAP. IntelliJ EAP works perfectly for me.
Here is a tip that you can try:
- Go to Help > Edit Custom Properties…
- Paste
-Dawt.toolkit.name=XToolkit - Restart your IDE
It will tell your IDE to run in X11 mode, and your Wayland desktop environment will use its X11 compatibility layer. On my machine, freezes are gone and the IDE performance is back to normal (which means, for Rider, “usable” but far from perfect). There is still a ~1GB memory leak somewhere when I exit Rider (and it accumulates if I restart Rider), but I can’t say if it’s a problem with Rider, KDE (6.6) or a driver.
I’m not saying it’s magic, but it’s worth a try 😉.