This year, I finally switched over to using Wayland on my desktop. I figured that with Ubuntu planning to use it by default in 24.04 and Fedora already defaulting to it, it was likely stable enough to use.

I've had a few issues in the past when I've tried it, primarily around screen sharing, but thankfully most if not all issues I've hit in the past are solved. I did run into one issue, though: when setting startup programs or using Alt-F2 to run a program, it wasn't finding stuff on my path.

How did I solve it?

Unlike XWindows, Wayland doesn't use your configured shell when starting up, unless that shell is /bin/sh and/or /bin/bash. Since I use zsh, this meant that my configured path... wasn't, as far as Wayland was concerned. It only ever looks at $HOME/.profile, which is incredibly minimal.

I have a number of additional locations on my $PATH, but the one where the majority of any custom programs are installed is $HOME/.local/bin.

The solution was simple: add any paths I need Wayland to be able to see in $HOME/.profile:

if [ -d "$HOME/.local/bin" ]; then
    PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
fi