Right, the name or any kind of lineage does not matter, Wayland is the X11 successor because it is the current seriously developed and improved open display pro

Right, the name or any kind of lineage does not matter, Wayland is the X11 successor because it is the current seriously developed and improved open display protocol. Nothing about Wayland stole from X11, has any less legitimacy to be the post-X11 protocol than something called X12, or prevents anybody else from improving X11 or from working on an alternative they call X12 or anything else. I don't know why people get so hung up about this. People including its creators may have been over-optimistic about Wayland, but it was never going to be a case of a weekend hacking binge producing something useful out of the gate (X11 had that distinction because it was entering a very small and very green field). X11 has been used for so long because it is very well supported, robust, and has been extended and improved for decades and most of the remaining problems it has are very hard to solve. And that's exactly why we also didn't see something called X12 happen overnight either. The fact that Wayland has been created and worked on and blessed by a number of X11 alumni did lend it a good amount of credence early on, and one might say gives it the right to be spiritual successor to X11. But really if you censor the names and look at the practical reality rather than sentimentality, Wayland creators and developers have been going down the long difficult road of coming up with something better and nobody else did, so that is really why it is the next X11. Progress may seem slow but it does not stop. Features continue to be added, implementations continue to improve, support continues to expand and its takeover seems almost inevitable at this point. Someone might mention "network transparency" at this point. As far as I've seen from the outside looking in that was never the fundamental requirement of the protocol as far as I can tell. Non-transparent protocol like DRI were never not considered to be X11 by the X11 architects and developers who wrote and merged them, showing they have always been quite willing to step out of rigid dogma and embrace practical application. The original X announcement never said the project was a network transparent window system, it said it was a good-but-not-perfect window system and if a good windows system today does not require network transparent protocol (because users don't care as much as they did back then or because networking can be achieved at other layers) then there is no reason it couldn't be X12. The X12 page linked here enumerates some other X11 features that could be dropped too, I've never seen a reasonable argument for why a network transparent protocol is the be-all and end-all of X.