Qtractor Qt, GTK, X11 and Wayland.

Submitted by Hattori Hanzo on
Forums
Qtractor

Hi,
I have a question about Qtractor and desktop environments—or rather, window managers—for X11 and Wayland.
Is it generally better to use Qtractor (which is built with Qt) with Qt-based desktop environments like KDE and LXQt, or is there no difference compared to GTK-based alternatives like GNOME and XFCE? Would the system load be lower? Would Qtractor be more stable or perhaps perform better?
The same questions apply to window managers under X11 and Wayland: is one preferable to the other for Qtractor? Does Qtractor actually support Wayland?
Sorry for the questions, but I’m not technically savvy enough to claim I truly understand these technologies.

Many thanks in advance!
Best regards!

Submitted by rncbc on Wed, 2 Sep 2026 - 20:58

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Qtractor is a Qt C++/Widgets application and thus quite independent of the DE or WM of your choice and preference, whether Qt or GTK based and under X11/Xorg or Wayland.

In my case, I do run it on KDE/Plasma6 and KWin_wayland, but there's no excuse for you to choose that in detriment of any other environment or display manager.

However, as any DAW out there, whether free, commercial, open or closed-source, no matter, it should retain the X11/Xcb interface and protocol to talk and embed the vast majority of plug-in GUIs in this world, which is something that Wayland does not support natively and I'm afraid it won't ever as it all has to go through some translation layer eg. Xwayland).

So, whenever you hear saying this "Wayland is the future", it might be just still a way long and farfetched prophecy, at least for (any) modern audio software, not just Qtractor ;)

hyu.
cheers

Thanks, and sorry for the late reply!
I’ve used KDE almost exclusively on all my PCs so far, and on the machines where I use Qtractor—the slightly newer ones—I’ve almost always used Wayland with hardly any issues. It’s a completely different story, of course, when I try to launch Ardour—though luckily, that rarely happens. Under Wayland, it just crashes and freezes. I’ve recently been experimenting with Arch, LXQt (using KWin and Labwc), and Wayland on an old ThinkPad, and that’s where I ran into problems with Qtractor for the first time. I think it was with Labwc? Qtractor froze, though I was able to close it. I suppose very old PCs generally don't work very well with Wayland?
Best regards :-)

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