Graphics & display

Display protocol

Wayland is the default session protocol on modern Parch editions; Plasma runs its Wayland session, GNOME runs GNOME Wayland. X11 remains available through XWayland for legacy applications, and X11 sessions are still installed on editions where a compositor or driver requires them.

What developers must know:

• Test on Wayland. Screen capture, global shortcuts, clipboard managers, and tray applets behave differently. Use portals (xdg-desktop-portal, plus the KDE/GNOME backend) instead of X11 APIs.
• App ids matter. Wayland matches windows to applications by app id (desktop-file name). Set StartupWMClass in your desktop entry correctly or window rules and dock integration break.
• Fractional scaling is normal. 125% and 150% scale factors are common on laptops; test your app at both.

Graphics drivers

The stack is the standard Arch set: Mesa for AMD/Intel, linux-firmware for GPU firmware, and vendor drivers where needed:

Hardware	Stack	Notes
AMD	Mesa (RadeonSI/RADV)	Works out of the box
Intel	Mesa	Works out of the box
NVIDIA	proprietary nvidia/nvidia-open or nouveau	The Parch Driver Manager detects and offers the right variant
Broadcom Wi-Fi/GPU	broadcom-wl-dkms in ISO lists	DKMS modules must match the installed kernel

DKMS is the recurring integration risk: any out-of-tree module needs the matching kernel headers, and kernel upgrades rebuild it. ISO package lists pair kernels with their headers deliberately (see packages.x86_64).

KDE Plasma

Plasma is the flagship Parch desktop, themed with Parch components: parch-sddm for the login screen, Plasma color schemes, and the plasma-setup first-run tool. Edition-level differences and theming packages are covered in Desktop profiles.

Other desktops

GNOME editions use gnome-parch for theming; XFCE, Hyprland, and experimental COSMIC editions carry their own configuration repos (parch-hyprland, hyprland-dots). The component map lists them all.