[TacticalCoder]

I honestly don't understand your comment at all. I'm not super familiar with Wayland.

Is it possible for a "smaller DE" or a lightweight WM to properly support Wayland or is Wayland support only possible with layers upon layers of bloat?

I'm asking because I'm still on X but I see that either I'll have to quit using Linux or I'll have to eventually move to Wayland. And I like my WM/DE ultra lean and ultra small.

If Wayland implies KDE or Gnome, I'm leaving Linux the day I cannot use X anymore...

[michaelmrose]

So with X there is an official implementation and a window manager implements a very small amount of functionality on top of that.

Wayland has basically nothing anyone would use its merely a specification for each window manager to write their own implementation of X AND a window manager. 15 years in there is now a library or two to make it easier but its still none the less writing X + wm.

[johnny22]

there are many wayland compositors like sway, hyprland, labwc and others i'm not aware of. sway is just i3, but done as a wayland compositor. i would expect you'll see more popular ones in the future. XFCE is goign that way as well, but slowly as expected.