How to run Polytoria on Wayland-based compositors

I recently tried running Polytoria on my Wayland compositor of choice—Hyprland, just to discover that the Polytoria Launcher doesn’t currently work natively under Wayland. Instead, it needs to run through X11. Normally, launching a game from the Polytoria website tells your computer to open it via xdg-open. The launcher registers a protocol handler for polytoria://, which therefore should automatically launch the game. The problem is that the launcher ends up trying to run through Wayland, where it doesn’t work correctly.

Now yes, because Polytoria is a flatpak, you could try to flatpak --override but surprisingly that won’t work, instead—you have to make your own custom .desktop file that opens the flatpak application via X11 (so xwayland), here’s how:

1. Actually create the custom desktop entry.

Create a new desktop entry in your local applications directory (~/.local/share/applications/), with the ID of the Polytoria Launcher being the file name (com.polytoria.launcher.desktop):

nvim ~/.local/share/applications/com.polytoria.launcher.desktop

And add the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Polytoria Launcher
Exec=env GDK_BACKEND=x11 flatpak run com.polytoria.launcher %u
Icon=com.polytoria.launcher
Categories=Game;
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/polytoria;

By setting GDK_BACKEND=x11, we’re telling GTK to use the X11 backend instead of the native Wayland backend when launching the application via flatpak.

2. Set the new desktop entry as the default Polytoria protocol handler.

Once you’ve saved the file and quit the text editor, you’ll want to update the mine list for the Polytoria protocol handler.

xdg-mime default com.polytoria.launcher.desktop x-scheme-handler/polytoria

This registers the custom protocol handler as the default handler for polytoria:// links.

3. Tried launching a game!

That’s it! Try playing the game of your choice in Polytoria and this time, it’ll ask you if you want to open via the Polytoria Launcher—the one modified to run under X11 than xdg-open—the one running under native Wayland and continue.

Hopefully one day the Polytoria Launcher will support Wayland natively and this workaround won’t be necessary. I’ve heard that Polytoria 2.0 is out but I haven’t tried it yet because I don’t really play Roblox-type games—I don’t even play Roblox. Till then however, this trick is a very simple way to get Polytoria working on your Wayland compositor.