How to run Polytoria on Wayland-based compositors

So, it turns out Polytoria can’t run in Wayland natively, and that you have to run it in the X11 backend. But, as you may of noticed—when lanching a game on the site, it’ll say to open the game via xdg-open. This is because the game is trying to open itself via it’s protocol handler—which is trying to open itself in Wayland. Yes—you could just 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, here’s how:

Note: nvim is the text editor I use, replace it with your text editor of choice.

1. Make the com.polytoria.launcher.desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/

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;

As you can tell, it’ll open com.polytoria.launcher with the x11 backend for GDK.

2. After 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

And 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.