When comparing Weston vs Wayfire, the Slant community recommends Wayfire for most people. In the question“What are the best Wayland compositors?” Wayfire is ranked 2nd while Weston is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Wayfire is:
The usage of a plugin system allows for a lot of customisability.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Nice appearance
Has a good appearance with borders, buttons as expected of a stacking window manager.
Pro Headless Mode
Can run in headless mode (useful for tests & automation).
Pro Fast
Pro Absolutely very lightweight
Weston is the lightest Wayland compositor. It runs without lag even on old Core 2 Duo laptops, and the Weston animation also runs fluidly without problem.
Pro Simple
Pro Stable
Pro Plugin approach
The usage of a plugin system allows for a lot of customisability.
Pro Nice blur feature
The blur plugin makes this compositor look nice.
Pro Fastest compositor with earth.google.com/web
Pro Optional tiling
Wayfire has a basic tiling extension built in, and more advanced third party plugins like this one are available.
Cons
Con Nearly impossible to manipulate windows programmatically.
Con Basic, less configurable and less compatible
Outside basic window management, no other fancy features. Outside adding launcher to the bar and changing bar colour, no other customisation is available. Also, it is less compatible with most Wayland applications since most are based on wlroots
Con Less configurable compared to x11 counterparts
The borders and title bars are less customizable. Outside colour change nothing else is possible. Plugin approach is a plus but as of now, no known plugin is available to change the appearance of window decoration. Firedecor is a good option but seems deprecated as it doesn't match the current Wayfire version.
Con Dependency issues
Hard to match builds with correct wlroots version. Building is difficult because wlroots version is either greater or lesser than the required version.
Con Plugins require working wayfire to build but with each update, the plugin becomes incompatible and unbuildable
The case with firedecor.
Con Cut/paste not reliable
Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But most of the time not.