[Spivak]

> Even with a relatively monolithic and "opinionated" protocol such as X11 it's not uncommon to encounter applications that don't play very nicely with alternative paradigms (because they expect a tray to be available, or to be able to place floating windows anywhere they want for instance

I think in the long run you’ll actually be quite happy with Wayland for your use-case since Wayland removes a lot of the weird things that Windows can do without the help of the (tiling) compositor. A tiling compositor actually has far far more power to beat windows into submission than an Xorg based WM ever could. Surfaces can’t move, steal focus, put popups anywhere without the compositor having a say and, potentially, just saying no.

And GNOME has removed support for xembed tray icons in favor AppIndicator which is just a generic dbus interface which a tiling WM can actually sanely implement.