GNOME is building a window save-and-restore system

One of the features users often miss when moving from X11 to Wayland is the ability to remember and restore window positions between sessions. Under X11 an application could decide for itself where to open; under Wayland, for security reasons, that behavior is left to the compositor, and for a long time there was no ready-made solution.

At the GUADEC 2026 conference, held in the Spanish city of A Coruña, Adrian Vovk presented an overview of the work on a system-wide save-and-restore mechanism for GNOME. This is not a one-off solution for a single application, but a platform framework that all of the desktop's programs will be able to use.

The third attempt

The road to this goal has not been a quick one. According to Vovk, two previous attempts to establish a corresponding API ended in failure. Even so, he expects the third run to be a success.

Those waiting for the familiar behavior to return right away, however, will have to be patient: the feature won't make it into the upcoming GNOME 51 release, which is scheduled for October. The work continues, and users will see its fruits later.

The very framing of the task is telling for the current stage of desktop Linux's development: many scenarios that were taken for granted in the X11 era now have to be rethought and carefully rebuilt within Wayland — in such a way that convenience doesn't come into conflict with the new protocol's security model.

Source: LWN.net