I compiled Weston with USE="xwayland" and found out that XWayland doesn't work out of the box. I tried creating ~/.config/weston.ini with the following content: [core] modules=xwayland.so That helped. I also found out that there's a weston.ini.in in Weston's tarball, which is used to generate a sample configuration. It would be nice if the ebuild for dev-libs/weston included that file (as a non-default sample config) because it is quite useful for new users. It would be much better if a default weston.ini for /etc/xdg/ was automatically generated based on which USE flags are enabled.