Not necessarily. The GNOME edition uses Wayland by default, but the other editions still use X11 as the default display server.
Now, I don’t know about XFCE — I don’t use it — but KDE Plasma does have built-in support for Wayland, albeit that it’s still far from perfect; it’s a work in progress.
Note: If you have Nvidia graphics hardware and you wish to use the proprietary driver, then you’ll have problems getting that to work in Wayland.
That being said, the recent improvements in KDE have been massive. It is worth checking out. In my experience, most problems come from missing Wayland support in applications. For instance, PyCharm does not work well.
As in: it requires manual setup and fiddling with config files. Also, you won’t have hardware acceleration on games. But other than that, it works fine.
Gnome edition is the best option if you want wayland, because it works out of the box. But kde should work too nowadays, I hear.
AFAIK, KDE Plasma is the best-looking desktop environment, but it is not exactly as lightweight compared to something like XFCE for example (I like efficiency).
So with that in mind, can anybody tell if Manjaro on XFCE also works with Wayland?
This is also improving for nvidia >=470. I’m using gnome on wayland with 470 for a bit. The kernel option nvidia-drm.modeset=1 did the trick. gdm works too with it.
But KDE Plasma takes up a lot more GPU resources than XFCE, right?
All I remember was I once installed Kubuntu and even though desktop environment very eye-candy, it was not as butter-smooth compared to Cinnamon or XFCE on my integrated GPU.
Only if you have the compositor enabled — it is enabled by default on supported hardware. As I understand it, XFCE does not use compositing by default, and you would need an external compositing window manager (like e.g. compton) to get similar effects.
I don’t know when that was, but Plasma 5 and all of its effects have been working very smoothly here on my system with integrated Intel graphics for the last three years.