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Xorg didnt define policy, which is why things like window management was offloaded to the window manager process. Look and feel was also not part of the policy

Xorg didnt define policy, which is why things like window management was offloaded to the window manager process. Look and feel was also not part of the policy of Xorg, and was defined by the widget sets, window manager, etc. In the wayland model, these previously modular components that communicated through process boundaries to cobble together those policies that make a desktop are typically subsumed into one process called the compositor. Look and feel is still the domain of the widget set, but window policy is not.

chousuke 6y ago
Right, and nothing prevents you from writing a compositor that talks to an external process to handle window management. It just happens that no-one does it, because it's insane and difficult to make work properly. The compositor's job literally is to juggle the clients' buffers, which includes deciding what gets drawn on the screen and how. There are other processes involved though where the compositor and the client do talk the Wayland protocol via IPC, such that the compositor hands off various responsibilities to external processes. As far as I understand, X11 ended up with the window manager architecture pretty much by accident; initially, window managers didn't even exist.