I think you’re unfamiliar with the general ideas around exactly what a display is in an OS, so don’t be offended if I break it down:

In Windows, there is only THE compositor, meaning no separate distinction from one process or another, it’s all the same display process as far the OS goes.

In MacOS, there is the compositor (the screen display manager) that loads first, and everything after that is a subprocess that handles different things: login security, window management, launcher, search…etc.

In Linux everything is generally separate. Your first login screen is its own process, which then calls another process to load your DE or whatever, and then everything is handed off after that.

If all you want is a “Kiosk Mode”, you just skip everything else. No display manager, login manager, DE…etc. You just boot the kernel, and have a compositor load. That compositor will then be responsible for displaying what you launch from there. So you Daisy chain things like that, and skip all the stuff you don’t need.

Wayland isn’t going to be your issue if you’re saying you’re building something from scratch. It’s pretty lightweight on its own, because it’s just a framework of libraries and APIs.

The compositor and environment you build around that is what will be taking the majority of resources to run whatever rinterface you’re going to have.

Sway is fairly minimal, but if you just run a bare compositor layer and figure out a launcher from there, it would be lighter. But you’re talking about Megabytes of difference, so it’s not going to be much different.

Edit: also, I was assuming you’re asking about memory, but could be wrong.

In Gentoo, emerge compiles packages from source on practically every machine you set up. matrixOS remedies this by building once and distributing binaries, so you skip the compilation wait entirely.

Okay, soooooo…basically disregarding the entire point and benefit of Gentoo? The entire reason you’d want to build from source on a specific machine or architecture is for the compiler optimizations done on that hardware. Just shipping binaries around is normal, so I’m not getting what the point is here.