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Save and restore may be coming to GNOME

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By Joe Brockmeier<br>July 22, 2026

GUADEC

One of the features that users often miss when moving from X11 to Wayland is<br>the ability to save and restore the position of windows between sessions. At GUADEC 2026, held in<br>A Coruña, Spain, Adrian Vovk provided an overview of work that has gone<br>into providing a platform-wide save and restore framework for GNOME. After two<br>failed attempts at landing an API, he believes that the third try will be the<br>one to succeed—though not in time for the upcoming GNOME 51 release<br>due in October.

I did not attend GUADEC in person this year, but I watched the<br>video of Vovk's talk after it was streamed. The individual talk videos<br>have not been posted yet, but his talk is available at 5:40<br>in the full video from day two of the conference. The slides from the<br>session have not yet been posted.

The idea behind the save and restore feature, Vovk said, is simple. A person<br>is using their system and has applications open while working on something, then<br>they need to log out of the desktop or reboot for some reason. When they log<br>back into their desktop, they would like to restore the previous session: that<br>is, application windows resume their previous positions and sizes, re-open the<br>same documents, and so forth. Currently this is not possible in GNOME, at least<br>not without additional extensions.

There are GNOME extensions that try to emulate this behavior, such as "Restore<br>Geometry" and the creatively titled "Another<br>Window Session Manager". However, the functionality is arguably something<br>that should be available in GNOME itself.

Benefits

Save and restore is a commonly requested feature for GNOME, Vovk said. Its<br>absence is also something that people often cite as a deficiency in Wayland when<br>comparing it to X11. It has practical benefits, he noted, in recovering from<br>application and system crashes.

He said one of the benefits he found most interesting about save<br>and restore was that it could encourage users to update more<br>often. Updates often require rebooting the system, and users of<br>immutable systems must reboot to apply updates: "However, rebooting<br>the system is quite disruptive. You lose everything you were working<br>on." He admitted that he would get his workspace set up as he<br>liked it and avoid applying updates for one or two weeks so he would<br>not have to start over again.

The groundwork for save and restore could also be used for "other, fancier<br>features". For instance, mobile phone operating systems save the state of an<br>application and shut it down to save power or RAM, then restore it when the user<br>switches back to the application. It might be possible to do something similar<br>on the GNOME desktop. Another way the framework could be used is to implement<br>something like Apple's Handoff feature that allows<br>users to move an application's state on one device to another and continue<br>working on the target device.

Vovk emphasized that he was not promising those features would be<br>implemented or even worked on, but the save and restore framework would set the<br>groundwork for such things.

History

With X11, applications would register with the session manager using<br>the X<br>Session Management Protocol (XSMP), which provided a uniform mechanism to<br>allow sessions to be saved and restored. The applications were responsible for<br>communicating their state and for restoring themselves. "Theoretically we<br>could have used this with Wayland, but it has some problems", Vovk said. He<br>noted that X11 session save and restore had been broken in GNOME for quite a few<br>years; then the code for it was dropped entirely when X11<br>session support code was removed from GNOME in GNOME 50.

The big problem, he said, is that XSMP was all command-line<br>driven, which meant that an application would provide a command for the session<br>manager to run at the next login, usually with a file that had the application's<br>state saved to it in some fashion. "Of course, that means that none of this<br>works with a sandbox. I mean, we don't want sandboxed apps to be able to tell<br>the operating system to run some commands at login."

To ensure that save and restore works with sandboxing, Vovk's replacement for<br>XSMP would be an XDG desktop<br>portal. This does not diverge too far from the way that XSMP worked, he<br>said. Applications still register with the GNOME session manager, and it still keeps<br>track of what to restart on the next login. Applications are relaunched by<br>using the desktop<br>entry rather than passing a command line for the manager to run. When an<br>application is...