WinBox Linux Client doesn't Support Wayland and Alpine/Gentoo (musl/busybox based distros)

RouterOS General
1

I am running Alpine Linux, with Wayland. When using either Flatpak or binary, I am unable to launch the WinBox Beta 4 Linux Client.

The flatpak issue is related to not having X11.

I am fine using a flatpak, but I am not going to install X11 components just to suit WinBox. I would love to use the QT Client, but wayland support would be really nice.

Error with Flatpak:

flatpak run com.mikrotik.WinBox
Warning: Could not find the Qt platform plugin "wayland" in "" (:0, )
Fatal: This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: xcb.
 (:0, )

A workaround for Flatpak for the time being is to make sure there is an xcb fallback for QT. e.g. setting env variable below:

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland;xcb

Wayland should absolutely be supported by the client, especially at this juncture in time, though it is nice to just have a linux client to start!!! Finally!!


The Alpine issue is related to renameat2 missing symbols. It would be nice to see WinBox be compatable with musl and busybox based distros out of the box, but flatpak is sufficient for now.

Error with Alpine trying to run Bin:

renameat2: symbol not found
1 Like
2

Agreed, Wayland has better protocol security than X11 and it would be a huge improvement over X11 for Winbox to support.

3

As an update to this, the renameat2 missing symbol (not wayland related) will be corrected with the next musl update which adds a renameat2 wrapper.

One can also use xwayland-satellite easily as a workaround.

4

Ubuntu 25.10 doesn’t support X11 applications anymore at all. WinBox won’t start.

6

1: this has nothing to do with the distro. It has to do with your desktop environment. Kde uses xwayland to handle this.

https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/

2: there are many ways to get an xserver going under wayland such as xwayland-satellite which is great in my experience.

3: Winbox should be supporting wayland also as most desktop environments and compositors are heading in that direction.

7

This is the key package. xwayland. e.g. on Ubuntu: https://packages.debian.org/en/trixie/xwayland

8

I have to correct myself. I have winbox 4.0.1 for linux running on Ubuntu 25.10. My fresh install missed a few files and synaptic, which I needed to install them. In the terminal, the missing file is listed. After solving that one by one, you can install six or seven (really) packages and then winbox runs like a charm.