non-reparenting

So the workaround ends up being impersonating another non-reparenting WM, for instance Sun's Looking Glass.

Might be an issue with non-reparenting WMs in general.

This all works because they're using a custom (probably non-reparenting) window manager and can do whatever they want.

Most Java distributions have the ability to work with non-reparenting WM's, but they detect it based on the window manager name.

Needing weird workarounds for applications to not display blank grey windows on non-reparenting window managers.

I can't play games while using Xmonad since the games don't play nicely with non-reparenting window managers.

Actually I bootstrapped all of my init systems with OpenRC; it has tools for dependency calculation and all runscript based init scripts can be run with -D so that you can handle dependencies rather than it; I gradually replaced the existing init scripts with something a bit more amenable to the non-reparenting style I prefer, but it's very useful for getting started.

I still remember how you needed to set environment variables to work around "Java applications produce empty grey windows under non-reparenting window managers" for years and years.

The only issue is with certain java-based applications such as PyCharm or Arudino IDE, in which sometimes the windows aren't drawn correctly due to the JVM not playing nicely with "non-reparenting" window managers (such as i3).