Both don’t ship with their own Wayland compositor, but there are enough to choose from.
Xfce comes with a wayland session using labwc out of the box, but was also tested with Wayfire. The devs state you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for the native window manager xfwm to be ported into a Wayland compositor, since they don’t know if/when it will be done. Almost all other Xfce components support Wayland now, while retaining X11 compatibility.
LXQt’s newest stable release has full Wayland support, with 7 different Wayland compositors to choose from within a GUI settings menu: Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri
https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1734220800
https://lxqt-project.org/release/2024/11/05/release-lxqt-2-1-0/
sway, wayfire, river, hyprland and labwc are standalone wayland compositors. why we need desktop environments inside them!
A compositor is normally a component in a DE, not a DE on its own. If when “standalone” it doesn’t provide a toolbar, launcher and maybe a terminal emulator (or at least call some generic wrapper to hook into one, something like xdg-terminal-exec) I wouldn’t consider it a DE.
I mean… openbox is used in X11 desktop environments like LXDE… I don’t see why labwc should be treated like it cannot be a component of one.
And river has almost as a mission statement to become more of a framework than a DE on its own… they even have the goal in the long term to remove things from it to make it more modular… it’s definitely not something intended to work standalone.
You don’t need a desktop environment, but it takes away a lot of config work if you want a full featured desktop.