i’ve used Signal as my preferred messaging app since around 2015. for a long time, i had the desktop application, and used it often to text directly from my laptop. since switching to Wayland, years ago now, i have simply lived without it: the desktop app didn’t have native wayland support, and i was unwilling to jump through xwayland hoops.

today, i finally broke down and went looking for a fix. it turns out Signal’s electron app has supported wayland since 2021. to get this to work with my launcher in Arch Linux, i had to run with the following options: --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland.

my full signal-desktop.desktop is:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Signal
Comment=Signal - Private Messenger
Comment[de]=Signal - Sicherer Messenger
Icon=signal-desktop
Exec=signal-desktop --use-tray-icon --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland -- %u
Terminal=false
Categories=Network;InstantMessaging;
StartupWMClass=signal
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/sgnl;x-scheme-handler/signalcaptcha;
Keywords=sgnl;chat;im;messaging;messenger;security;privat;
X-GNOME-UsesNotifications=true