Both don't ship with their own Wayland compositor, but there are enough to choose from.
Xfce comes with a wayland session using labwc out of the box, but was also tested with Wayfire. The devs state you shouldn't hold your breath waiting for the native window manager xfwm to be ported into a Wayland compositor, since they don't know if/when it will be done. Almost all other Xfce components support Wayland now, while retaining X11 compatibility.
LXQt's newest stable release has full Wayland support, with 7 different Wayland compositors to choose from within a GUI settings menu: Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri
https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1734220800
https://lxqt-project.org/release/2024/11/05/release-lxqt-2-1-0/
sway, wayfire, river, hyprland and labwc are standalone wayland compositors. why we need desktop environments inside them!
You don't need a desktop environment, but it takes away a lot of config work if you want a full featured desktop.
Exactly, I used hyprland for a while but configuration is too time-consuming if you want a decent status bar, launcher, keybinds... So I'm excited to try it with LXqt, thanks for the heads-up!
A compositor is normally a component in a DE, not a DE on its own. For it to be a DE in my book the "standalone" installation needs to, at minimum, provide: a launcher to execute apps, a toolbar/statusbar, and maybe a terminal emulator (or at least call some generic wrapper to automatically hook into one, something like xdg-terminal-exec).
I mean.. openbox is used in X11 desktop environments like LXDE.. I don't see why labwc (essentially wayland's openbox) should be treated like it cannot be a component of one.
And river has almost as a mission statement to become more of a framework than a DE on its own.. they even have the goal in the long term to remove things from it and instead expose more to the commands/API to make it more modular.. it's definitely not something intended to work standalone and they expect people to develop third party layout generator programs.
Maybe sway is the one in that list that might be the most "standalone", since it does have swaybar built-in.. but the default configuration still expects you to provide at least something like dmenu to use as launcher, as well as making sure you have your terminal, etc, since it does not list them as specific dependencies of the sway package, so officially they aren't really part of sway as if it were a DE suite.
I guess we are used to it, I like to use sway in the desktop and KDE in the laptop but I want to run Wayland. And with both of them is possible.
I used sway for quite a while and after the initial setup (which was very finniky) it was alright to use. But then you start to notice little things that annoy you and by that time you've forgotten where that setting was in the config. For Linux noobs like me it's not great long-term. If you like having all your DE settings in a config file sure, use it, but I'm going back to KDE.