[charcircuit]

>What made the X architecture much more interesting is that it avoided coupling the window manger to the compositor

This is the industry standard, putting the compositor and window manager in separate processes.

Android separates SurfaceFlinger and WindowManagerService.

iOS separates quartz compositor and springboard.

Windows separates dwm and explore.

MacOS separates WindowServer and Dock.

[wongogue]

Dwm is both the compositor and window manager in Windows. It’s the same with WindowServer in macOS.

If you are talking about the shell or task switcher, then yeah your point stand with Gnome but KDE has kwin and plasmashell processes.

[saurik]

Tell that to the Wayland people? ;P