Dear Maintainer,

Without EGL, KiCAD experience on Wayland can be quite bad even when
using XWayland. At least on AMD GPU based systems, there are ~10 second
lags when switching between PCB and Schematics windows on two different
Wayland workspaces.

I've seen commit 5a3af461df6fc6e4be868399277ea4134e703773 ("Revert
"d/rules: Turn option KICAD_USE_EGL on" ), but I think it would be
better to enable EGL support in libglew, libwxwidgets and KiCAD
instead of disabling it everywhere.

At the moment GLX is used on XWayland and that is missing some
workarounds for SwapBuffers(). For EGL wxwidgets already has the
necessary code to disable vsync. See also upstream bugs:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/10235
https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/issues/23512

I asked for the workaround to also be implemented for the GLX API,
but I believe it's a good idea to enable EGL in Debian even if that
happens.

P.S.: If anyone runs into the lag issue and finds this bug: You can
run KiCAD like this as a workaround: `vblank_mode=0 /usr/bin/kicad`.

Thanks,

Hi,

I wanted to ask if there are any blockers regarding this. Using KiCad
under sway defaults to xwayland now and this results in a quite blurry
interface which is not nice.

best,

werdahias

I'm currently packaging glew 2.3.1.
It should be EGL by default.

regards
Alastair

Thanks!

best,

werdahias

Unfortunately, building glew with EGL makes openscad no longer able to
compile.

I filed a separate issue for the openscad build failure, #1133065, in case
we can (hopefully) find a way to resolve both issues.

 - Kristian.

Ok, so I've uploaded a 2.3.1-6 release of glew, which now ships an X11
build of libGLEW as libGLEW-X11.a

I have done a test build of openscad with this; the build works with the
following patch:

--- a/features/glew.prf
+++ b/features/glew.prf
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
    QMAKE_LIBDIR += $$GLEW_DIR/lib64
  }

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
glew, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 1057479@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@debian.org> (supplier of updated glew package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:15:59 +0100
Source: glew
Architecture: source
Version: 2.3.1-6
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@debian.org>
Changed-By: Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@debian.org>
Closes: 1057479 1132634 1132862 1133065
Changes:
 glew (2.3.1-6) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   [ Dimitry Ishenko ]
   * revert "Add libsm-dev, libegl-dev" to depends for libglew-dev.
   * Build GLEW_X11=Off to minimize deps for wayland. Closes: #1132634
 .
   [ Alastair McKinstry ]
   * Install libGLEW.a in -dev pkg. Closes: #1057479
   * Supply libGLEW-X11.a with GLEW_X11=On GLEW_EGL=Off. Closes: #1133065
   * Fix pkgconfig files. Closes: #1132862
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 498b469fdbf75d19cb70e19bb24f3e34799cd3e9 33820 glew_2.3.1-6.debian.tar.xz
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 38a554e68c59cb5b266297b3f8197e7a87e22d40d69711170e53af1801e3ef9e 33820 glew_2.3.1-6.debian.tar.xz
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Alastair McKinstry <alastair.mckinstry@mckinstry.ie> writes:

Thanks. I have uploaded openscad_2021.01-12 that links with libGLEW-X11 and
this should make openscad build with newest libGLEW again (once the riscv64
builder gets to it).

I've also discussed briefly with openscad upstream, who agreed with the fix
and informed me that the next release of openscad will no longer need this
work-around.

 - Kristian.