[dashboardmess]

“Putting everything in the compositor” isn’t mandated by Wayland at all, and I think only gnome does it. If you implement the protocols defined by Kwin, you can reuse everything in KDE without using it. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but properly implementing it on X11 also is more work than you would expect. The only problem here is politics, as KDE hasn’t stabilized the interface as far as I know.

Wlroots isn’t opinionated at all. In theory, it’s perfectly possible to write a gnome shell alternative using wlroots. Writing a taskbar for nearly all wlroots based compositors is also possible.

You could even write a plugin for wayfire to implement the Kwin protocols, and write another plugin to implement a simple window manager.

As for changing the titlebars, as long as you enable CSD, you could just write a theme.