Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 10, 2026 16:09 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop by felixfix
Parent article: Gentoo looks back on 2025

Try and get your head round the compositor / display server / this-that-and-the-other of Wayland and X.

Wayland separates the hardware drivers from the display server (is that the compositor? Someone explained it for me here but I forget :-) and basically sits between the hardware drivers *in linux* and the compositor / display server. Well it would, it's just a protocol with sample implementations, not a piece of software in its own right.

There's still an X display server - fully maintained - that runs as a program on top of your Wayland compositor. But there is also this - I believe fully maintained - X display server that is a Wayland compositor in its own right and sits on top of the kernel.

So any of your old desktops will run on this X compositor just fine (or they should do!).

I love KDE. I hope you will too. I don't use much stuff that comes with it, it just doesn't get in my way and make life hard, which is what's put me off Gnome every time I've tried it. Just be warned though, Plasma (I haven't got my head around the difference between KDE and Plasma - I don't need to so I haven't bothered) is moving fully Wayland. So if I've got it right, you will not be able to mix KDE and FVWM in the same login session - I don't think you can run two compositors in the same session and Plasma and X will be squabbling over who gets to control the hardware rofl.

(The old full-fat X Server is dead because the X guys didn't want to maintain the hardware drivers because that's linux' or whoever's job, not the screen display software's job, which is how we got Wayland. That and the old design was very hard to retrofit with decent security in a hostile world.)

Cheers,
Wol

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Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 10, 2026 16:27 UTC (Sat) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (32 responses)

The FVWM mailing list had a discussion once about not working with Wayland. I do not remember the details. It may be that the current X11 / Wayland combination will work with FVWM, I'll just have to try and see what happens.

I did try a KDE/Ubuntu combination for a while, some years ago, but I mostly remember it being treated as a second-class citizen, and Gnome hadn't been dumbed down as much as now. I have had to adjust to all sorts of computer changes, from punched cards and 17,000 rpm drums for main memory. I'll make something work.

I don't think FVWM can be mixed with either KDE or Gnome as desktop manager. I've never tried. I don't want all that nonsense of the featuriffic window managers and desktop organizers. I had a job with a terrible boss for about six months, convinced we were always goofing off, so I added a button to play Curly Joe saying "waitaminnit we gotta woik?!" whenever he came in the room to watch us. Took a minute at most. I wouldn't have any idea how to do that with KDE or Gnome.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 10, 2026 19:42 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (31 responses)

> It may be that the current X11 / Wayland combination will work with FVWM, I'll just have to try and see what happens.

Your *standard* X-over-Wayland won't be able to run FVWM aiui. That's why there's this X-compositor version instead - they'll probably know all about that on any dev-oriented FVWM mailing list.

Cheers,
Wol

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 11, 2026 17:01 UTC (Sun) by ThomasAdam (guest, #57986) [Link] (30 responses)

I’ve explained this here:

https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/discussions/1258

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 11, 2026 17:28 UTC (Sun) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for that explanation. It's that lockin / loss of flexibility and innovation which makes me detest Wayland so much, and why systemd annoys me so much too. I fell in love with UNIX when I first used it around 1980, for its flexibility and one-tool-one-thing functionality. I remember trying to explain the difference between pipes and backticks to my brother around 1987 or so. When he finally got it, I could hear the revelation in his voice.

Systemd and Wayland are throwing that away. Monolithic control has always sucked.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 11, 2026 21:16 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Systemd and Wayland are throwing that away. Monolithic control has always sucked.

I think you're blaming the wrong thing ... I agree the old Unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well" is great, but ...

SysV was a disaster on that front. Pretty much every distro (I exaggerate but not much) had its own version of every script. Scripts were full of boilerplate that would get missed and mess things up. Etc etc.

Systemd pid-1 is a simple program (program not script) that just fires off daemons and makes sure they're running, according to a simple definition file. Yes I know systemd the project has grown and grown, but having dealt with SysV, Linux, Unix-that-can't-make-up-its-mind-what-it-is ... while systemd has suppressed *variety*, I think that's all to the good. There aren't half a dozen ways to find out your hostname, for example, any more.

Wayland? What's monolithic about a *protocol* that allows the display server to communicate with the kernel? There were/are multiple X11 servers - X, X11-386, X-Org, XWayland ... We now have multiple compositors - ?Plasma, Whatever Gnome, Weston, Wayback, etc etc. What's monolithic about that? A more monolithic system would probably be an improvement!

And unfortunately from the PoV of the systemd/Wayland haters, people are adopting them because they "Just Work" (tm). I keep banging on about design. There are two "second system creation" mechanisms. There's "the old system is rubbish, we need to rewrite it", and "the old design is outdated, we need to redesign it". Say what you like about Poettering, he does view design as very important. And the result is almost always smaller, faster, simpler, and less buggy! than the previous one. Plus easier to modify. People who think "it needs rewriting" almost always rediscover all the corner cases from the old system the hard way. People who design first usually have their "oh shit" moments before they start coding ...

And that's what's wrong with X. The world has shifted underneath it, large chunks of the core protocol are obsolete and a liability, but they can't be junked. While Wayland is a major pain in that all this stuff has been thrown out, so everything on top of it needs a rewrite, reality is all this code was obsolete. And there just WASN'T an easy fix ...

Cheers,
Wol

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 11, 2026 19:34 UTC (Sun) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (27 responses)

From the linked article:

"And it's this which Wayland is going to kill. Because of the freedom that XLib offered on XServer, it gave rise to so many different environments all with their own ideas on handling windows. Just look at something like Giles Orr's list of window managers: https://www.gilesorr.com/wm/xwmtable.html"

At the top of that page is another link (https://www.gilesorr.com/wm/table.html) pointing to "The Comprehensive List of Wayland Compositors for Unix". This list currently contains 55 entries!

The fvwmorg article goes on complaining that "we are forced to choose between an inferior and bloated DE or some sort of tiling window manager, only providing the ability to look like everything else."

Btw, KDE Plasma uses Server Side Decorations, both on X11 and on Wayland.

I feel most of the criticism of both Wayland and Systemd simply stems from resistance to change.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 11, 2026 21:39 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I feel most of the criticism of both Wayland and Systemd simply stems from resistance to change.

Please remember there are (at least) two very different reasons for that resistance. You'll notice I'm *all*for* some change, and *passionately*opposed* to others.

As always, I like change that makes my life easier, and oppose change that makes it worse.

Some opposition is driven by Luddism (which is NOT ignorant stupid opposition). Most Luddites were clever and intelligent. The problem was "hey this new technology is going to make my job obsolete". An existential threat to their livelihood. Systemd makes system administration simpler and easier ...

Other opposition is driven by the "Cascade of Teenage Attention Deficit Syndrome" or whatever it's called. Rewriting for the sake of rewriting. Unfortunately, old age and neuro-illnesses is becoming much more common, and those people just cannot cope. Unfortunately I deal with this all the time. Youngsters just cannot see the problem ... but older people will simply abandon technology rather than adapt. I'm doing it myself, and absolutely HATE having to support technology I don't want to understand, just because my family can't cope.

Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" pretty much sums up my view of much new technology ...

Cheers,
Wol

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 12:34 UTC (Mon) by ThomasAdam (guest, #57986) [Link]

> The fvwmorg article goes on complaining that "we are forced to choose between an inferior and bloated DE or some sort of tiling window manager, only providing the ability to look like everything else."

It's not complaining -- it's stating why a fvwm "port" to wayland is not technically possible, and hence the visual effects that many seem to like which fvwm can provide, won't be possible either. Hence, you're in a situation where most DEs and WMs will end up looking very similar to one another.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 14:21 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (24 responses)

> I feel most of the criticism of both Wayland and Systemd simply stems from resistance to change.

There's something rather patronizing about this statement, as if change is always progress and resistance is always the sign of a Luddite.

This is MY computer. Linux and X11/FVWM give me more control of what *I* want, not what Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, or Bill Gates want, or what the Gnome team or even KDE team want. Wayland restricts my choices; that is not progress. Wayland has all the hallmarks of being rushed into development by a committee-knows-best who weren't interested in the public's opinions; they saw their "solution" before actually defining what the problem was, and here we are, enshittified. Who needs options and choices and flexibility? Apparently only old fuddy duddy Luddites; we can be safely ignored.

Implying users are Luddites because they don't like enshittification is not the way to win arguments.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 14:41 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> This is MY computer. Linux and X11/FVWM give me more control of what *I* want, not what Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, or Bill Gates want, or what the Gnome team or even KDE team want.

Then feel free to write+maintain ALL the software on YOUR computer instead of demanding other folks do it to your specifications.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 15:10 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

Where did I demand other folks write code to my specifications?

I didn't. You voiced an opinion, I responded with my own opinion.

And when it degenerates to this level, it's time to end the discussion.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 15:16 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (20 responses)

> Wayland has all the hallmarks of being rushed into development by a committee-knows-best who weren't interested in the public's opinions;

I think actually that sounds far more like the committee behind X-386 or whatever it was - you know - the X11 server Linux had before the committee expelled the sole developer actually doing any work on it. The transition from X-386 to Xorg was swift and clean precisely because there'd long been friction between those trying to drag X-386 into the modern day, and the committee who just wanted it to die. When X-386 lost its last developer, all the users couldn't jump ship fast enough.

And then that developer decided X was beyond saving, and became one of the moving figures behind Wayland. So you're actually maligning the last person who put a lot of effort into keeping X alive.

X is a dinosaur that belongs in the knackers yard. Be thankful that there are lot (relatively speaking) of people keeping it on life support. And don't forget - the reason Wayland took off is because it is evolutionarily much fitter (the world has changed, X hasn't), it is much less complex (I agree, X wasn't when it was designed, but the world has moved on ...), and it solves real peoples' real problems - like security in a modern hostile world.

I find there are nasty papercuts in Wayland, but there are different nasty papercuts in X, and I'd rather run something modern that was designed to run on modern hardware, than something ancient that's full of cruft because it's needed by the software and users don't want any more.

Cheers,
Wol

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 15:50 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (19 responses)

There's a huge difference. The X committee (the original ones, not whatever was going on with X-386) was developing from scratch with no real precedent and no existing customers. The Wayland committee had decades of experience and millions of existing customers, which they proceeded to ignore as insignificant.

Whatever good Wayland has done is at least partially offset by the harm they have done. Contrast Wayland with Torvalds' passion for not breaking existing usage. That's more precedent the Wayland committee ignored.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 16:06 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (17 responses)

> The Wayland committee had decades of experience and millions of existing customers, which they proceeded to ignore as insignificant.

You simultaneously hold them up as experts in their fields yet dismiss that expertise when it results in an outcome you don't like.

(Hint: those "decades of experience" have shown them quite conclusively that the _fundamental design_ of X11 was the problem, and adding another pile optional special casing to the existing jenga tower would only exacerbate it further)

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 16:20 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (16 responses)

No. I hold them up as self-impressed experts who ignored existing customers in favor of what they wanted.

Contrast their intent to break existing customers with the kernel philosophy.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 16:45 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

Which is why they called it Wayland, and not X13 (which it effectively was). They wanted to make it clear it WAS a CLEAN BREAK.

Yes, there's been a lot of frustration where things don't work the same way in Wayland as they did in X, or functionality was very slow to be moved across to Wayland. But I'm not aware of any instance where a new version of Wayland broke previous versions of Wayland.

They made no bones about "X will break when moved to Wayland" - that was an inevitable consequence of the redesign.

Linux faces a similar threat from that new Rust kernel - "evolve or die". Linux seems to have chosen the "evolve" path and probably very soon most new code will be written in Rust. The X developer (single - one man bus factor) decided the only sane choice was "die". Sorry, but that's what happened!

Cheers,
Wol

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 16:54 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Compare it to the Python 3 / Perl 6 evolution.

The switch from Python 2 to 3 was long, painful, with breakage everywhere. Do you really want that with X11 / X13? Don't forget the X11 devs themselves wrote it off as unsalvageable!

Or do you want the switch from Perl 5 to ?Raku. It's the next generation of Perl, it is Perl 6, but they changed the name to make it nice and clear that it's a RADICAL upgrade, and THINGS WILL BREAK.

The difference between X11/Wayland, and Perl/Raku, is that there were plenty of people prepared to keep Perl5 alive. It's difficult to find anyone even prepared to try and keep full-fat X11 on life support. Just XWayland, and some support for Wayback, which have had 90% of their old code ripped out and now rely utterly on Wayland in order to actually do anything.

Cheers,
Wol

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 17:21 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

Python3 and Perl 6 did not remove functionality. The Rust kernel will not remove functionality. Wayland did remove functionality.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 17:22 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Not really wanting to join this discussion, nor am I making any value judgement on the original topic... However, not sure your analogy makes the point you want.

Python 2 -> 3 was difficult, but there was still a lot of compatibility. It was still essentially the same language, much of the core language remained the same, just updates of libraries and APIs largely. The transition has largely succeeded, many code-bases successfully transitioned, and python3 didn't cause /too/ much pain.

Perl 5 -> 6: 6 is very different (AIUI), not at all compatible. Perl 6 appears largely to be a failure from what I can tell - and Perl has generally become irrelevant (certainly, nothing what it once was in terms of relevance).

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 16:47 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (11 responses)

> No. I hold them up as self-impressed experts who ignored existing customers in favor of what they wanted.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses".

Wayland (and, for that matter, X11) doesn't have "customers" or any other sort of formal agreement in place that mandates what its developers (as individuals or collectively) should be working on.

(Incidentally, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more active Wayland deployments than X-based ones these days, and that's before one factors in non-desktop uses like the entire automotive market. The overwhelming majority of Linux deployments with GUIs run Android, which also rejected X11 as being wholly unsuitable for its needs)

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 18:38 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (10 responses)

I would be very surprised if there are more active X11 users than Wayland users on desktop Linux. Most of the big distributions have switched to Wayland by default, some of them a long time ago. I think Fedora has defaulted to Wayland for close to a decade. IIRC, both GNOME and KDE Plasma have officially ended X11 support, so that's a lot of users who won't be supported on X11, if they were even still using it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of users have been using Wayland for years without realizing it.

That said, it's unfair to treat everyone lamenting the decline of X11 as simply resistant to change. X11 does have some advantages, like network transparency, that support real-world use cases. People who depend on those features need practical solutions for getting their work done using Wayland, not criticism for clinging to the past. Even people who just like the workflow they're used to in their old window manager would be more accepting if Wayland supported something similar.

FWIW, the Ford quote is apparently apocryphal; there's no contemporary record of him saying it.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 19:38 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

> X11 does have some advantages, like network transparency, that support real-world use cases.

Wayland is _more_ "network transparent" than X11 -- because the "normal" behavior for X applications for the last two or so decades is to bypass "the network" via various extensions (xshm, dri, etc etc), and the network-capable fallback paths are increasingly bitrotten, if they were ever written to begin with. Combined with client-side rendering becoming the overwhelming norm and an inherently chatty protocol, this places X is at a huge performance disadvantage when operating over a network.

All of that adds up, so in real-world terms 'waypipe' tends to make for a much more pleasant end-user experience than ssh -X (ie the mechanism that everyone is using when they say "X11 network transparency") -- and once you step off of local high-speed low-latency LANs the difference becomes even more pronounced.

...Just last night I was accidentally using inkscape on a remote system to work on an SVG file; I didn't realize it wasn't local until I couldn't find the file I had just saved.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 13, 2026 14:09 UTC (Tue) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (3 responses)

From a network protocol perspective, something "slightly enhanced screen-scraping" like RDP is perhaps a sort-of local optimum, considering the development interest/manpower isn't just there to make a "proper" remote-transparent next generation X-like protocol. Or to the extent we have such, it's the web platform with http+html+js and not a 'traditional' GUI toolkit.

That being said, one thing I love about X remoting is that it's so convenient when using ssh -X (or -Y). When you have logged in to some remote system and are working there, and if you need some gui app you just launch it with "app &" and it pops up. No need to explicitly login to some remote desktop etc. like when you're using some RDP/VNC client. Is there anything like that in the pipeline in the wayland world?

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 13, 2026 14:22 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Is there anything like that in the pipeline in the wayland world?

'waypipe' has been around since 2019.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 13, 2026 14:43 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

There's waypipe, which understands Wayland protocol and tunnels it over a network. It knows about DMABUFs, SHM objects, and a few other bits where Wayland protocol passes a reference to a kernel object over protocol (done via a file descriptor), and converts those into compressed data over the wire, but otherwise tunnels protocol unchanged as-if you were on a local system.

IME, it's better than X remoting over "Internet" latency connections - Wayland has very few round-trips baked into the protocol, so latency is less perceptible.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 13, 2026 15:29 UTC (Tue) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

Thank you, from reading the man page I found online this seems exactly what I was looking for.

(I'm on Ubuntu LTS here which due to my GPU driver defaults to X11, so haven't bothered playing around with wayland much yet. But I guess in half a year or so when I upgrade to the next release it'll default to a wayland session.)

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 15, 2026 21:58 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (4 responses)

X11 does have some advantages, like network transparency

I happen to run Wayland on my laptop, which runs Ubuntu 22.04; X no longer works there (it used to work on 21.04). I have done ssh connections to other machines, and invoked X applications there, and this works. Don't ask me how.

What I have tried with 21.04 and where X worked better than wayland was xrandr. What I have read about is that X Window managers don't work in Wayland. I don't use the laptop much, so I just use the Gnome nonsense that Ubuntu gives me by default, but on my desktop, I have a twm setup with >30 years of history, and I am not keen on switching. Especially: Where will I get a replacement that works the same way across decades? Gnome is absolutely horrible in that department.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 16, 2026 9:12 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

I have a similar issue with xmonad, after building a decade or two worth of custom workflows, often hotkeys that are built on top of utilities that also only work on X moving to Wayland seems like a lot of work and the worst thing is, I won't even know how well it will work until after I have put in all that work.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 16, 2026 17:56 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

As another dedicated XMonad user (15+ years), `river` seems the way to go for me. See the wiki[1] for implemented WMs. The default is mostly XMonad-ish enough for me. I miss Submap bindings, but those should be possible with the new extension. Still needs a WM implementation to do it yet though.

[1] https://codeberg.org/river/wiki/src/branch/main/pages/wm-...

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 16, 2026 9:57 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> What I have read about is that X Window managers don't work in Wayland. I don't use the laptop much, so I just use the Gnome nonsense that Ubuntu gives me by default, but on my desktop, I have a twm setup with >30 years of history, and I am not keen on switching. Especially: Where will I get a replacement that works the same way across decades?

Wayback.

It's been discussed elsewhere in the last few days, but basically all the drivers in "full fat X" have been ripped out of XWayland because they're also in the kernel. So XWayland sits on top of a Wayland compositor and enables you to run X applications. Which is why it won't let you run an X DE.

Wayback is, I think, a Wayland compositor who's sole purpose is to run X DEs.

I don't use it - you'll need to dig for yourself - but that's where you need to look.

Cheers,
Wol

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 16, 2026 15:44 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Wayback is a Wayland compositor whose sole purpose is to run XWayland, so that X11 DEs can continue to work even without X.org to drive hardware.

It won't solve the future problem of newer applications dropping X11 support completely; at the moment, the only way I'm aware of to solve that is to run a Wayland compositor like Weston as a nested application inside your X11 session.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 17:31 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Wayland is not X, just as Linux was not Minix. X11 continues to exist and, given -modesetting supports using most of the same APIs that Wayland relies upon, is going to continue existing. If you want to remain on X, you can do. App developers may gradually choose not to continue supporting X, but that sounds like an issue you'd have with the app developers rather than the Wayland ones.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 19:01 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Wayland has all the hallmarks of being rushed into development by a committee-knows-best who weren't interested in the public's opinions

The first version of Wayland was developed by Kristian Høgsberg in 2008, who is also a major contributor to the X server. It was developed by a small team of enthusiasts for the first several years.

It has a model that is almost completely different from the free-for-all X, but it's no less powerful.