I’m thinking about choosing the default XFCE desktop environment for EndeavourOS because it’s very lightweight.
Does it also support Wayland?
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Not at this time. 
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As far as I know the only DE with full wayland support is Gnome.
kde/plasma has experimental support and sway is wayland-based but it is a WM.
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Oh bummer!
I feel having hardware acceleration is a must (e.g. hardware-accelerated decoding on browsers - VAAPI), and AFAIK having Linux running on Wayland facilitates that. I could be wrong though.
These days, that should be supported on X11. At least for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers.
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By now it seems to me that the development of Xfce is stagnating. Version 4.18 should have been here long ago. At least that was announced when 4.16 was released.
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Yes, I managed to have hardware acceleration with Firefox on Mint but that required some work, whereas on Ubuntu Wayland that was much easier (not sure if it’s something to do with the distro or the display server though).
Also, in recent years, both Plasma and GNOME have become much better optimised and lighter on the resources than what they used to be. So, now Xfce is not that light in comparison.
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A couple of things here. First XFCE development has not stagnated. It’s purposely slow and some of us like it that way. It rock solid when released.
Second I find little difference in browsers these days and most modern browsers work well.
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Does XFCE have a dark theme as well?
I’m thinking of installing and using XFCE if I am able to get hardware acceleration on browser using X11 (VAAPI). The only thing that makes me want to use GNOME is the support for Wayland.
Of course, lots of them.
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If you want Wayland implemented to the letter, you have to use Gnome. Next best Wayland implementation i know of is Sway as they also maintain wlroots.
TLDR: no it doesnt, most DEs dont or have poor implementations.
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If Wayland is a must for you, You will need to use gnome. KDE is trying but not there yet.
If you want something lighter then you’ll have to do without wayland for the time being.
I prefer XFCE but that’s my personal choice and I most likely do not have the same requirements that you have. Good luck in your search.
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My current specs is a AMD Ryzen 5 5500u APU, and I find that GNOME on Wayland runs more smoothly than say GNOME on X11, at least on this machine running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Is that to be expected though?
It depends what you mean by “smoothly”. It also depends on your expectations and how much you are willing to tweak the config to improve performance.
That being said, if you like gnome/wayland, just use gnome. Unless you have extremely resource constrained hardware, chasing lightweight at the cost of usability is a complete waste of effort. The degree to which xfce is lighter is debatable to begin with. The differences between the major DEs mostly comes down to how they are configured by default.
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Second that! XFCE is as solid as a rock. Who cares if they release “slow”, XFCE users are out for stability not whistles and bells.
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