IIRC, the reason that compiz doesn't work on later E versions is because in E17, the compositor was an optional module, but sometime after that, the compositor became mandatory - part of the core - and so Compiz won't work without many changes because there'd be TWO compositors. If that's what you're trying to ask. Correct me if I'm wrong anyone.
I don't know if we can use Wayfire but it sounds promising
You* can try it and play with that, the Enlightenment of Elive beta versions includes wayland support, to use it you should simply run enlightenment_start from the console (ctrl + alt + F1, out of the graphical system), probably suggested to stop lightdm before to run it too (sudo service lightdm stop). You will notice that you are running in Wayland mode instead of graphical system because of some small differences, probably window borders too
Also, could be good to talk / ask about that in the #edevelop IRC chat channel
We may have these visual effects back for Elive in the newer versions!
~/wlroots-master ❯❯❯ meson biuld
The Meson build system
Version: 0.55.0
Source dir: /home/david/wlroots-master
Build dir: /home/david/wlroots-master/biuld
Build type: native build
Project name: wlroots
Project version: 0.12.0
C compiler for the host machine: ccache cc (gcc 8.3.0 "cc (Debian 8.3.0-6) 8.3.0")
C linker for the host machine: cc ld.bfd 2.31.1
Host machine cpu family: x86_64
Host machine cpu: x86_64
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wundef: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wlogical-op: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wmissing-include-dirs: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wold-style-definition: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wpointer-arith: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Winit-self: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wstrict-prototypes: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wimplicit-fallthrough=2: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wendif-labels: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wstrict-aliasing=2: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Woverflow: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wmissing-prototypes: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wno-missing-braces -Wmissing-braces: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wno-missing-field-initializers -Wmissing-field-initializers: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -Wno-unused-parameter -Wunused-parameter: YES
Compiler for C supports arguments -fmacro-prefix-map=/prefix/to/hide=: YES
Found pkg-config: /usr/bin/pkg-config (0.29)
Dependency wayland-server found: NO found 1.16.0 but need: '>=1.18'
Did not find CMake 'cmake'
Found CMake: NO
Run-time dependency wayland-server found: NO
meson.build:98:0: ERROR: Invalid version of dependency, need 'wayland-server' ['>=1.18'] found '1.16.0'.
A full log can be found at /home/david/wlroots-master/biuld/meson-logs/meson-log.txt
~/wlroots-master ❯❯❯
As a first it looks you're missing "cmake" and prolly other (Debian) build tools. You need to get:
api build-essential autoconf automake autotools-dev dh-make debhelper devscripts fakeroot xutils lintian pbuilder
And mesonbuild has some clarifications: https://mesonbuild.com/SimpleStart.html
It's a bit tricky to install LFS stuff on a Debian system as you will miss out on some dependencies.
It might be better to get the latest versions either as a .deb package (which will prolly fail to install, lacking dependencies) or from the meson git page.
There are ways of creating an own .deb from a git repo containing source code BTW.
After installing cmake , wlroot still errors on wayland-server version.
I tried to upgrade the wayland-server but cannot uninstall the preinstalled wayland-sever without taking out a lot of software packages at the same time via synaptic.
could you please show me how to create *.deb so I can try to upgrade via apt-get upgrade?
EDIT:- I could downgrade wlroot
EDIT2:- I found wlroot-0.10. That installed fine.
Edit3:- i might have to install the earler packages, but i find that you need the latest wayland-server. i'll play around and see what i can install
I tried Wayfire on Garuda linux (Arch based) but it very unstable as it is now. Wayfire is a complete rewrite of Compiz and it doesn't have all functionalities for the moment. It's definitely not ready for anything other than Beta testing. My laptop isn't recent and may be a little old for that (HP Pavillion G6: AMD A6-3400M APU/Radeon HD Graphic card).
If you want try something else based on wayland. I found that Sway desktop (An I3 on Wayland) was very light and quite stable. But its a totally different desktop experience. I kept it as a backup desktop and since it is light, I use it when I want to run VMs on KVM.