Cairo Dock spawns as window, similar to usual Desktop applications.

[Arvo0]

I apologize if this is poorly formatted. Expected behaviour: "Dock-like" behaviour, like seen with Waybar or wf-dock. Steps to recreate: open cairo-dock on a Wayland DE or Compositor. I've tried this on Niri, Sway, Wayfire and Cinnamons wayland session. All show same behaviour..

[dkondor]

Hi,
this is very likely caused by running a version of Cairo-Dock without proper Wayland support. Specifically, you need at least version 3.6.0 and ensure that it is built with layer-shell support. You can verify this by starting Cairo-Dock from a terminal and checking the summary that it prints immediately upon starting; this should include:

Cairo-Dock version: 3.6.0   (or newer)

Cairo-Dock was built with support for:
...
 * gtk-layer-shell:              yes
...

Cairo-Dock is currently running with:
 * display backend:              Wayland
 * layer-shell:                  yes
...

See also the Wiki here: https://github.com/Cairo-Dock/cairo-dock-core/wiki/Wayland-support

If you installed Cairo-Dock from a package, check that it is a recent version -- unfortunately, many distros have not yet updated to version 3.6.0, so it is possible that you have an outdated version as well. For Ubuntu and derivatives, you can use our PPA: https://launchpad.net/~cairo-dock-team/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

If you compiled Cairo-Dock yourself, you need to make sure that the development version of the gtk-layer-shell library is installed; see here for more info: https://github.com/Cairo-Dock/cairo-dock-core/wiki/Compiling-from-source

Note: if starting Cairo-Dock from a terminal works, but you have the problem when starting it on login, you may need to check that the WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable gets set correctly (since you already have waybar working, I don't think this is the issue though).