Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 15, 2026 21:58 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop by rgmoore
Parent article: Gentoo looks back on 2025

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.

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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.