I personally find Mate being buggy. Panel items move around after logins. XFce is much more stable. The only advantage mate has is that it's using about 100 MB less ram, and that it has a user management front end, that xfce lacks. Other than that, I found xfce superior.
And the MATE user management app can be downloaded and installed on XFCE, works quite well
P.S—
My main problem is screen tearing (my display refresh seems to be 59.999, and I notice this when moving windows around or watching 60 FPS video or even just scrolling PDFs)—is that something Wayland would even help at all? Am I just wasting my time here?
option "TearFree" "true" in xorg.conf.d.
yes waylabd could help in that, but i'm not sure how good xfce and mate behave in wayland, btw you are using nixOS, rollback is easy no?, try and tell us :v
XFCE doesn't support Wayland yet, however a lot of the components will run under it. They've got a tracker on their site.
Both are not ready. LXQt will be soon though.
+1 for LXQt. But what do you mean XFCE is not ready? Never used MATE, so I cannot tell, but XFCE seemed solid when I used it
It doesn't support Wayland.
XFCE on Wayland is solid?
Aha, I see, thank you
LXQt is already on Qt 6.6 (?) which means native wayland-first support.
They are not fully done but that will only be a month or so.
Until then, I dont know really? Will be great!
Meanwhile MATE and XFCE are on GTK3? Which is not perfectly wayland ready afaik.
I thought maybe I could do something like MATE + Sway?
Not possible. Spend 5 minutes googling it