I haven't used a Microsoft OS in a long time but somebody told me a few years ago that alternative shells like Litestep became severely limited after the UI changes in Windows 8/10. Not sure if it's true or not or why that is.
I think you missed the mark on this though. I never saw Wayland as being any less about mechanism over policy. In theory X does have more mechanisms to work with but in practice the well-behaved programs that get used a lot tend use toolkits that follow ICCCM/EWMH strictly, and won't do strange things that are out of the ordinary with the policies of the popular desktops.
Compared to Wayland where the idea seems to be that WM implementers actually got more freedom to add any policies they want because they also implement the display server. From a client perspective it's still the same as X. Clients get what they need to function in isolation and don't really have to care about a WM's policies, and when they want to care they check for a specific policy. (In X they would check for an atom) I guess that probably doesn't work so well for Arcan because it also doesn't set anything in the way of policy. Maybe it would be possible for Arcan users to write policies as wayland extensions in lua?
I think you missed the mark on this though. I never saw Wayland as being any less about mechanism over policy. In theory X does have more mechanisms to work with but in practice the well-behaved programs that get used a lot tend use toolkits that follow ICCCM/EWMH strictly, and won't do strange things that are out of the ordinary with the policies of the popular desktops.
Compared to Wayland where the idea seems to be that WM implementers actually got more freedom to add any policies they want because they also implement the display server. From a client perspective it's still the same as X. Clients get what they need to function in isolation and don't really have to care about a WM's policies, and when they want to care they check for a specific policy. (In X they would check for an atom) I guess that probably doesn't work so well for Arcan because it also doesn't set anything in the way of policy. Maybe it would be possible for Arcan users to write policies as wayland extensions in lua?