I tried a bunch of tiling window managers over the last two years, and found that the choice of X11 or Wayland does not make much of a difference with regard to the “second class citizen” effect you described. What finally solved it for me was switching to GNOME (ie. mutter on Wayland) with the PaperWM extension. Fundamentally, I’m running a conventional desktop with no tearing and standard, widely used solutions for keyboard shortcuts, the clipboard, screenshots, and floating windows, so graphical applications look and feel correct even if they are a bad fit for the tiling model. Tiling is then implemented by PaperWM at a higher level, in JavaScript, leaving the complexities of hardware accelerated, animated compositing to GNOME. It’s a good combination – I’d like to see more tiling window managers designed to take advantage of hardware-accelerated compositing.
