Well really, what people actually want, by my estimation, is a machine that works and to not have to adjust their workflows. These are both very sensible things

Well really, what people actually want, by my estimation, is a machine that works and to not have to adjust their workflows. These are both very sensible things that everyone understands. The stuff about "UNIX philosophy" and composability is mostly BS. We're talking about Linux, the least UNIX-y UNIX-like imaginable. People getting mad that a single program does too many things is insane when the first thing your computer boots out of firmware is the Linux kernel. Same for many of the more ideological systemd complaints, some of which exacerbated by people not understanding that systemd is an umbrella project and not an init daemon (and you can in fact swap in and out many of the components like timesyncd, networkd, resolved etc.) I think whether Wayland really was what people wanted out of systemd or not is mostly not that important. I'm arguing that people were mad because systemd took away their choices, you're arguing that Wayland wasn't the choices they wanted. I'm not sure what choices they wanted. I don't think most people who are mad about new things have fully-formed opinions about what they actually want in the first place. Either way, Wayland gives you nothing if not plenty of choices, and many of them much more complete than what you could get with random WMs on X. Most importantly, though, I strongly disagree that X11 is the ideal protocol to build on. X11 is a mess that's hard to implement and if you omit anything you'll basically always break a non-trivial amount of software. XInput 1 is pretty broken but tough, Wine needs it. Have fun implementing Xv everywhere too, and XRender. Most modern apps just grab a GL or Vulkan context and ignore all of that, but if you want to meaningfully implement X11 those things need to be there. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point. Realistically, I'm sure we don't want to maintain multiple X servers. As it is, nobody wants to really maintain X.org to begin with... Well, there is one guy, but that doesn't appear to have gone so well so far. What's funny is, when people actually want to have X11 support, what they do instead is implement Wayland and use XWayland instead. Seriously, look at how many things implement Wayland: ChromeOS for Linux apps, SteamOS for game compositing, Windows for wslG, termux-x11... Wayland and Weston are much easier to implement and adapt than X11 and X.org were. When everything works well across all of the GPU vendors and the major applications have the remaining kinks ironed out, things will keep moving along and the sky will probably not fall. I honestly think that people were going to get cranky even if everything was done absolutely perfectly here, because succeeding X requires some people to do a bunch of work and adjust their workflows. Don't blame 'em, doesn't mean they're right.