I've been looking at Wayland for a little while now, and have been slowly coming to a similar conclusion based on the limited exposure I've had to it. I hadn't

I've been looking at Wayland for a little while now, and have been slowly coming to a similar conclusion based on the limited exposure I've had to it. I hadn't quite reached the view you describe here, solely because I was holding out a little optimism that things weren't really that bad. What I'm stuck on is the whyyyy. X has its faults, most definitely, but... X works for quite a lot of people, too. I've found that one of the most helpful additions to my worldview has been a sense of implementational balance - and particularly the understanding that reacting to perceived extremes by counterbalancing all the way in the direction of the opposing extreme does not produce balance, but rather drowns out the old extreme by all the noise made by the new one, unless the counterbalancing effort incorporates an embrace-and-extend model. I get the impression Wayland is only being worked on by people who've either been heavily bitten by X, influenced by those who have, or influenced by a rumor amplification-chain of toxicity about X. The 3rd is both the saddest and likeliest part, but understandably so - there was a nontrivial amount of X11 vitriol back in the 90s and 00s. I think this is primarily because the hardware ecosystem and the various vendor implementations were all indeed atrociously broken, so X had to be a bit broken too in order to make everything work. Graphics drivers (PCI access!) did their work in userspace, so X had to run as root. The kernel had no idea about the video mode; it was just told "if you try and print anything to the screen right now you'll confuse the GPU so badly so please just don't" and X handled the rest. GPUs were going through formative times (circa 2006) with the introduction of fundamental OpenGL functionality (now used for compositing). X wasn't modular, _and_ there were two vendors. And of course 256-bit color paletting was still something that got talked about and needed to be maintained through the whole stack. These were simply growing pains. Today, X.Org is modular, which is a small mercy for everyone's sanity; KMS simplifies driver development (as in, X doesn't have to be involved at all anymore); GPUs are somewhat (!) more stable and offer a more consistent GL API; nobody really complains when the display doesn't support <16bpp (ie requires paletted display) anymore. The list goes on. Things are absolutely not perfect... who knows, there may be an XInput3 :)... but things are on fire significantly less. So, it is IMO utterly unreasonable to lump the good parts of X in with the bits that maybe made a few core devs gnash their teeth and kill the whole thing for guilt by association! Sadly it looks like this is what we're stuck with. So, X11 will live on - but as a kind of negative space that future software historians will puzzle over and go "why did this Wayland thing state that they avoided such an oddly specific set of functionality?" This kind of negates the devs' apparent desire to make everyone forget it, haha. If they'd just taken the good parts and made something 11X better than X11...