Using GTK with Wayland 3 GTK Library Using GTK with Wayland Wayland-specific aspects of using GTK The GDK Wayland backend provides support for running GTK applications under a Wayland compositor. To run your application in this way, select the Wayland backend by setting GDK_BACKEND=wayland. On UNIX, the Wayland backend is enabled by default, so you don't need to do anything special when compiling it, and everything should "just work." Currently, the Wayland backend does not use any additional environment variables.