gabmus

Oh I definitely am out of touch, but I think I'll live with that 😄

The application needs to speak a protocol to be able to use it. If you use a X wm your apps need to be able to talk X's protocol to work, if you use a Wayland compositor your apps need to be able to talk Wayland's protocol (or run on Xwayland, which is basically an X server that runs inside Wayland).

The wm/compositor abstractions only work if your apps know how to use them via the correct protocol

Sorry if it's not a direct answer, but I can suggest you try inkscape instead. Of course it's a much more powerful program, and that comes with it being possibly a bit harder to grasp and definitely different from publisher, but it should be very easy for a beginner to make a simple birthday card collage.