It feels like the particular corner of the universe I reside on did not migrate to Wayland well. Perhaps it would less bother me if I didn't feel like I was be

It feels like the particular corner of the universe I reside on did not migrate to Wayland well. Perhaps it would less bother me if I didn't feel like I was being forced to accept KDE or GNOME or deal with a second-best experience. Having just set up a new machine the last few days (Debian Sid on a new Thinkpad L13) and spending a little while in a KDE/Wayland session, I remembered what I don't like about the big desktops: since they don't completely own the distribution underneath, there's always going to be a control panel that doesn't work as expected, or some incompatible software in there. The illusion isn't quite strong enough. My best theory is that the lack of compositor options is a timing issue: Wayland arrived at a time when most desktop Linux was moving towards the big desktops, and away from the classic standalone window managers. I suspect they were more or less a solved problem; FVWM in 2024 looks and works very much like FVWM in 2004, so there simply was less interest in them in general, let alone to bankroll a huge production number like making a Wayland-compatible rewrite. Tiling window management seems like a newish trend that acquired its own fanbase late enough that there was momentum to build things like sway. I'm surprised there isn't a "reverse xwayland" -- a paper-thin compositor that exposes Wayland top-level windows in a manner that twm and friends know how to wrangle. I know I can launch a Wayland compositor with its own captured desktop but that defeats the purpose of wanting something else to own the frames, decoration, and movement.