alt Hacker NewsThe fact that Wayland can't just substitute out pluggable WMs without changing a bunch of other unrelated infrastructure is IMO one of the biggest user-facing losses relative to X11. Anybody who is working to improve that is doing god's work as they say.
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It's a damper on development of new WMs and DEs, too. I have ideas for my own desktop I'd like to explore at some point, and if I do it'll almost certainly be X11 based initially because it's so much more quick and easy to wrap one's head around and get the iteration loop up and running with.
I'm not anti-Wayland and I think X11 has enough issues that it's worth transitioning over to something better but this is a critical weakness in Wayland's design.
You only need a single implementation that exposes an API for running a WM as an extension.
I don't really get why would it be a good idea to somehow mandate a specific architecture design from the standard.
Honestly, probably the best Linux GUI stack would look like a root Wayland server (not running as root ofc), inside which are nested a per-user Wayland servers (which can be switched between rendering to a monitor or offscreen for a remote login), inside which is nested an X11 server (which is freed from having to care about hardware), inside which runs a normal window manager.
You can do that already with libraries such as wlroots or Smithay
Not only a loss but a key disabler. Having used to having the same customized window manager for decades it's impossible to change to Wayland until there's a fully equivalent interface for managing windows so that everything works as I want from mouse clicks to keyboard shortcuts. Maybe it could be an existing window manager adding support for River, or Wayback layer that reimplements an X11 desktop root on top of a minimal Wayland compositor, but none of the current Wayland compositors even scratch the surface of this.