Nah, X11/Xorg is stable. I remember a talk from Keith Packard about a fix in the Xorg font server (which he assumed would not be used by anyone by now but he no

Nah, X11/Xorg is stable. I remember a talk from Keith Packard about a fix in the Xorg font server (which he assumed would not be used by anyone by now but he noticed a bug report from 5 years before he made the fix and he decided that if someone bothered to report a bug then there are some people out there still using it, so it is worth fixing it) where he also mentioned how to ensure that any future change wont break backwards compatibility. Also personally some years ago i tried to build a small GUI library i was working on at the time under a Red Hat distribution from 1997 and then run it on my 2017 Debian[0] (the colors are off because i didn't bother supporting colormaps) and it worked perfectly fine, showing that X11 (which is the only mandatory requirement the library has, under Linux at least) and of course the C library (the binaries are linked dynamically, not statically) do have two decades of backwards binary compatibility. It is just everything else that is built on top of that that doesn't work. At least everything else that modern desktops use, AFAIK something like Motif is also binary compatible going back decades (which is how Lesstif worked anyway since it was supposed to be binary compatible with Motif). [0] https://i.imgur.com/YxGNB7h.png https://i.imgur.com/YxGNB7h.png