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iceWM will not run under wayland. Using a DE on an old computer will not work.

Sure, but purely based on the comparisons between KDE and Gnome under Xorg and Wayland, I don't see any indication that Wayland would inherently use more memory.

It's simply a matter of using one of the lighter Wayland compositors, none of which have been tested in the comparison you linked.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Compositors

I think you are missing something. In a old system, which probably has at most 1 gig of memory (maybe 2 if you are lucky), I can run Wayland KDE or GNOME ? Seems to me 1487 is > 1000 :)

So, Wayland will kill off using GUIs under Linux on old systems. Even with 2G memory, if running Wayland, you will hit swap a lot unless you are just staring at an empty screen.

Now I do not know what sway uses, but my guess is it must be at best a bit less than 1G.

Under Linux, the only option is X on old systems. But as I mentioned, NetBSD along with OpenBSD will work quite well on these old systems.

So it is my belief, Wayland will push retro computing people off of Linux to one of the BSDs.

My point is simply that I can't see any evidence of Wayland using more memory than Xorf in the scenarios we can compare.

You're free to find or create benchmarks of lighter Wayland compositors and prove me wrong, of course.

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