The linux version of the Bitwarden Desktop Application still runs only on X11 and has no proper support for Wayland-only desktops. Wayland is now ubiquitous and many Linux users are switching from X11. In fact, new Linux distro installations now are defaulting to Wayland. So, Bitwarden should prioritize Wayland support.
This is blocked by an upstream electron bug under Gnome+Wayland: Resize window doesn't work on Wayland · Issue #44543 · electron/electron · GitHub . As soon as the upstream bug is fixed, Wayland will be made default ([PM-10448] Enable wayland where possible in Linux Desktop by quexten · Pull Request #10359 · bitwarden/clients · GitHub), but until then it has to remain disabled.
It’s been 4 months and the Electron developers have yet to acknowledge the issue. I don’t think this will be fixed upstream any time soon. Maybe this could be fixed within Bitwarden’s end?
It’s only fixable in Electron or Gnome. The issue is present on all electron apps that have an up-to-date electron version, and are on wayland instead of Xwayland.
The best that could be done on Bitwarden’s side would be detecting gnome specifically and only falling back to Xwayland on gnome.
Perhaps having the Bitwarden client detect if the DE is Gnome or not and adjusting whether to run in Wayland or Xwayland might be a good temporary solution, especially since it only affects that DE particular. Flatpak has the fallback to X11 permission, we could fallback to X11 for Gnome. Whenever Electron or Gnome developers fix the bug, then we remove the conditional DE checker and maybe the fallback X11 permission.
While you wait, this can be achieved via ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=wayland, which works quite well. I’ve been using that for the past year and haven’t had any issues so far (Hyprland)
my solution was to create a copy of bitwarden.desktop into ~/.local/share/aplications
then in Exec=bitwarden-desktop line I added --ozone-platform-hint=auto -s %U.
This fixed issues like the menus from app menu not appearing. (Hyprland)
I’m using the latest flatpak version of Bitwarden under Zorin OS (based on Ubuntu), specifically version 2025.5.1. I’m using Gnome DE with Wayland on the back-end. As of now this is the only machine with a Linux distro installed on it that I can test it on. The app runs, but I have a 4k monitor and the text looks terrible in the app. I try setting the environment variable ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=auto and it errors out. Same thing happens when I try running the flapak with the argument --ozone-platform-hint=auto tacked on the end (full command: /usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=bitwarden --file-forwarding com.bitwarden.desktop --ozone-platform-hint=auto).
The resulting error messages from the command line are:
[2:0620/170035.746758:ERROR:wayland_connection.cc(214)] Failed to connect to Wayland display: No such file or directory (2) [2:0620/170035.746830:ERROR:ozone_platform_wayland.cc(286)] Failed to initialize Wayland platform [2:0620/170035.747446:ERROR:env.cc(257)] The platform failed to initialize. Exiting.
Fortunately, I can tolerate blurry text in the app, but it would be really nice if it looked more crisp. Apparently it works with the natively installed version of the app (per others in this thread–I haven’t tried it myself yet), but I’d like to keep using the flatpak version for my own reasons.
Can anyone confirm this behavior with the flatpak Bitwarden app on Zorin (17.3), Ubuntu (22.04), or any other distros? Is there a simple fix possible? Am I in the right place to ask these questions and get assistance?
Additional Note: I know of one other Electron-based app that had a similar issue, but which is resolved by adding --ozone-platform-hint=auto to the end of the flatpak launch command. That app is Signal. As such it seems possible to resolve this for Bitwarden’s flatpak.
Thank you!