Intellij IDEA now runs on Wayland, and it runs surprisingly well! What’s even better, IDEA running on Wayland is now compatible with UTM, meaning that you can finally set up a perfect dev env in Ubuntu running in UTM! IDEA runs buttery-smooth, no hiccups; if I’d have to guess it’s partly because of JVM 21 and partly because of dropping X baggage.

How to enable Wayland

Starting from JetBrains Runtime (JBR) 21, JBR 21 supports Wayland. The easiest way to run IDEA on JBR 21 is to download IDEA 2024.2 EAP 2. Then, edit the idea64.vmoptions file and add the -Dawt.toolkit.name=WLToolkit VM option as described in JBR 3206 comment. Done!