When comparing Arcan vs Weston, the Slant community recommends Weston for most people. In the question“What are the best Wayland compositors?” Weston is ranked 4th while Arcan is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Weston is:
Has a good appearance with borders, buttons as expected of a stacking window manager.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Nice API for custom Window Managers
A pro- for programmers, but it is much easier to write a Window Manager for Arcan that it is for Xorg or any of the other options.
Pro Tons of features
So many things that can be done - video recording, streaming, clipboard managers, crash recovery, live window manager swapping, ... the list is endless.
Pro VR support
Pro Very customizable
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
Cons
Con Difficult configuration
To work it requires configured Lua files, command line options, environment variables.
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