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Comment by Athas | Hacker News Reader

Unless some abstraction layers have been added while I wasn't looking, Wayland doesn't have a notion of window manager - only of compositors. These compositors incidentally also manage windows (although that's not the Wayland term I think), but I think the correspondence of compositor and window manager is still 1:1. Thus it is safe to assume that anything called a "window manager" is for X11.

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fair point, but i think this distinction between compositor and window manager is going to go away. if the compositor manages windows, then technically it is a kind of window manager. calling it something else feels unnecessary technically pedantic.

if the term compositor wins out, then fine, but i feel that that won't happen.

The term "compositor" refers to a program that is significantly broader in scope than an X11 window manager. You can write the most basic but somewhat useful WM in about 50 lines of C, and literally *all* it has to do, is to respond to new windows being mapped. A Wayland compositor on the other hand has to do approximately half of the work of an actual full-blown X11 server. This is why almost every WL compositor out there is using wlroots - which continues to advertise itself as "60k lines of code that you'd have to write anyway".

Calling WL compositors "window managers" is somewhat like asking where's the horse in that car.

Calling WL compositors "window managers" is more like asking how to swap out the engine on that donkey.

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