We do not use JavaScript. It is Rust from top to bottom. The native applets are written with iced/libcosmic, and the same is true of the shell components in the compositor.
This looks super smooth but I wish there were a floating-first version. All of the notable standalone Wayland WMs I know about are tiling-first which doesn't work well for me at all.
Perhaps that's because the people driven by tiling window management are evangelical enough about it that they'll build entire new software stacks to support it, and the people who want floating windows are just... sufficiently satisfied by KDE/GNOME.
All I know is that I don't like the trend to moving controls into the title bar, making everything like Microsoft Office where there's so much crud in there you have to play Minesweeper to find a few pixels you can click on if you want to actually drag the window and not do anything else.
I want something that looks more like FVWM or even IceWM, a perpetual late-1990s vibe.
GNOME apps support window drag and drop on the entire title bar, even if buttons are beneath the cursor.
And the wayland compositor hyprland does support floating windows like any other compositor. Though I agree that if your comfortable with no/simple tiling, using Gnome/KDE/other DE's is likely your best bet.
I’m not really satisfied by GNOME, KDE, etc but the prospect of rolling my own is daunting to say the least. As a dev whose entire hobby and career work has consisted entirely of typical user-facing native desktop and mobile apps, the bits one need to work with to write a WM (let alone a DE) may as well be alien runes, and looking at the code for existing Wayland WMs doesn’t really help a whole lot.
I suspect they use Gnome Shell.. what a mistake if they do..
https://hyprland.org/ is where it's at