If it's the compositor that causes the problem, can't it be disabled? I don't know phosh but in Plasma you can disable the compositing from the system settings.

Nope, there's no option for that in phosh settings. Actually, it's the compositor (phoc) that starts gnome-session in /usr/bin/phosh. I've just tried to edit the startup script to launch gnome-session directly, but it would refuse to start.

It's also a pure wayland system, so it's quite unlike what we're used on desktop.

> It's also a pure wayland system, so it's quite unlike what we're used on desktop.

When you say "pure", do you mean "no XWayland"?

All Phosh distributions I’ve come across have Xwayland.

I see, thanks for your explanations :).

Yes, which means you can actually see the windows for things running in the background which can be nice when your eg reading something from firefox while writing an email. All the phone stuff is handled by chatty and calls, notifications are handled by libnotify, alert sounds are handled by feedbackd etc.