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Is it possible for that setup to show up as a virtual display on your main WM/DE, so you just extend to it, or does it need to run its own, separate instance? Can you drag a window from your main DE to the virtual display?

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With Xephyr, it's a separate instance per se. I've never tried attaching it to an existing session; this is total half-knowledge but it might have been possible with the old Xinerama protocol (which has been replaced with Xrandr). With the move to Wayland, it's all a bit of a moot point either way...

(You can absolutely use Xephyr on a Wayland session of course, since the latter is compatible with X11 clients. But the virtual display Xephyr provides is X11.)

Many Wayland compositors can just be launched nested with no extra steps, which is approximately the same as Xephyr.

I assume that approach has the same limitations as Xephyr too? I.e. independent session, need to decide upfront which to use when launching things?

AFAIK, yeah. It really is almost exactly like Xephyr, just that you don't launch a window manager into the new X server because the compositor is the display server.

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