Wayland compatible DE and dynamic WM

General system Newbie
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tl;dr: In order to use Wayland, what components of the OS have to be compatible with the compositor? Are there any other DEs which support Wayland (besides GNOME and KDE)?

Posting this in the newbie category since I don’t have a chosen DE/WM yet. (And probably a Linux-newbie question too.)

The thing is: I’ve been using EOS with KDE Plasma for 6 months since I left Windows. For first I wanted to have a similar experience, but I’ve seen other distros, and Pop!_OS’s (dynamic) window manager really got me.
I wanted to reproduce this, but it didn’t quite work on KDE. And since I’m switching WM anyway, I thought I might try a new DE as well! [But also, if you know a good dynamic WM for KDE, let me know!]

Here comes the problem: I use Wayland (and I want to stick around it), but I don’t quite get the compatibility. In order to use Wayland, what components of the OS have to be compatible with the compositor? Are there any other DEs which support Wayland (besides GNOME and KDE)?

Thank you for your help!

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Start here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland

  • The general idea is Wayland works everywhere, but you may or may not have issues as it is being worked on extensively.
  • KDE, Gnome, and Cinnamon have working support for Wayland, but the latter is less supported than the first two. There’s enlightenment too, but not many people use that DE overall.
  • If you have an Nvidia GPU, your chances of a tiling Wayland compositor working are far lower than if you have an AMD GPU.
  • If you don’t have Nvidia, then you’re in luck, and I’d recommend trying Sway, Hyprland, Qtile, or River.
  • Not sure if you’ve tried any of these for making KDE a tiling WM: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KDE#KWin_tiling_window_scripts
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Thank you for your answer!
I think I didn’t quite get the concept of a compositor before, but now I (more or less) do. :smiley:

If I recall correctly, I tried Kröhnkite, but it wasn’t as good as I expected. I might give it another chance though.

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I’ve heard good things about Polonium, so give that one a shot too.

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Not to the same extent as gnome and kde yet, but many do work on wayland and considered experimental.

Pop-tiling window management - you can use the extension on gnome; bismuth kwin script works very well on kde also. I think bismuth is a better integration.

Bismuth also works if you use lxqt+kwin and the kwin-scripts do work when installed from AUR.

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Based on its AUR page, Bismuth is discontinued (only works on Plasma 5). Polonium is said to be similar (and ddnn also recommended it) so I’m giving it a try.

I’ll also check that GNOME extension, thanks for that one too.

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Interesting. It worked fine a couple months ago, but admittedly, I don’t use plasma anymore so I’m not as well versed as I once was.

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Lxqt and MATE also have working wayland support, although they are both still relatively experimental like Cinnamon.

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I only mentioned Cinnamon because the OP asked about alternatives, but none of them are actually worth mentioning to be honest.

At the moment it’s like this: if you want to use Wayland, use KDE, Gnome or a popular Wayland compositor to have the best experience.

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Or use X11 things just work.

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use emacs as your wm. search it up its actually possible but on a serious note use Hyprland and sway