Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 12, 2026 18:38 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop by pizza
Parent article: Gentoo looks back on 2025

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.

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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.