@BKeyport @KristjanESPERANTO Turns out I owe you some thanks, if only because you got me thinking and questioning my assumptions.

I had previously assumed the anchor process of an X server needed to be an X application, but that turned out to be not the case, so the whole blackpixel executable could be removed entirely, eliminating a major contributor to the script size and a maintenance headache for me.

It does make the script even more obscure and alien though. That’s easily the strangest X config I’ve ever created.

Code is updated.

@KristjanESPERANTO Apology accepted, I didn’t really take offense, it really was mostly just irritation on my part at the flat-out dismissal of my work and everybody focusing on what I consider to be minor technicalities.

As for why I don’t use wayland (yet), X is what I know, and it does the business. I’m not saying I’ll never make the switch (I’m quite curious to learn more about it) but for now I’m happy to leave good enough alone. Frankly, I’m not sure switching to wayland wouldn’t break a things, since the ancient tools I rely on might not play well with the new kid on the block.

@KristjanESPERANTO since you got me curious, I looked into Wayland a bit.

So to answer your question again:

While Wayland is generally considered more efficient in general use scenarios, in a scenario where you want no window management, no window decoration and certainly no visual effects, that efficiency advantage would not only be negated, but turned into a disadvantage.

Also unlike X11, Wayland apparently cannot be started as a bare-metal service but always requires a compositor like Weston or Sway in the background which would actually not only result in a heavier premium in resource usage but would also require a more complex and error-prone setup.

Last but not least, wayland is far less use-case agnostic compared to X11. Like many modern software suites, it makes a lot of assumptions about how it is going to be used. Since many, if not most of these assumptions wouldn’t hold true in a scenario like the one we’re discussing here, using Wayland would carry a lot of the downsides of running MagicMirror on a full DE, in short, you’d be fighting against your framework instead of working with it.

In conclusion I can say from what I learned about Wayland so far, I definitely made the right choice with X11.

N.B. that are only the conclusions of a very brief look into Wayland on my part, so there may very well be ways to make it behave the way I want it to, but if they exist, they seem to be a lot less trivial and well-documented.