this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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I argue that X11 would have hyperactive development, if we did not have Wayland (or Mir, before it turned into a Wayland compositor). There are at least two major fields that do not work perfectly and cannot be changed by simple updates, it needs rewrite from ground up: a) advanced multi-monitor handling of different kind of monitors at the same time, b) security issues related to keyloggers, as apps are not isolated. Nobody want to touch the X11 code for more than simple maintenance, no one wants to rewrite major portions or add new features.
We just need Wayland, as you already noted there are very good arguments. A complete new base with modern code and people developing for modern times and hardware just makes sense. Think about it, do you really want to have X11 going forward the next decades? It's like holding to hard drives and saying its okay, there are no problems, and writing off SSDs.
Wayland was started by the X developers because they were sick and tired of hysterical raisins. Noone else volunteered to take over X, either, wayland devs are thus still stuck with maintaining XWayland themselves. I'm sure that at least a portion of the people shouting "but X just needs some work" at least had a look at the codebase, but then noped out of it -- and subsequently stopped whining about the switch to Wayland.
What's been a bit disappointing is DEs getting on the wayland train so late. A lot of the kinks could have been worked out way earlier if they had given their 2ct of feedback right from the start, instead of waiting 10 years to even start thinking about migrating.
That's the real issue. And its worse with Gnome, as Gnome doesn't want support "all of" Wayland and its protocols. That means Wayland will be broken on Gnome, despite Gnome being the most used DE (at the moment). People complain about the problems in Wayland, but not all problems are caused by Wayland itself.
However there were or are two big reasons I can think of why Wayland wasn't adopted early and for some may never: a) its much harder to be Wayland conform, because the window manager/DE has to do much more work, b) Wayland was just not ready before, as many important aspects were missing (in example some basic protocols, Nvidia) or broken. I don't blame them. For the record, I am not a Wayland chill, just talking about this, because there are many misconceptions (me included, I'm not perfect) and switched to Wayland just end of last year. Before that Wayland did just not work for me. I even switched from Qtile to KDE, because KDE has probably the best Wayland support (I hate manual window management).
Edit: I just remembered another reason why Wayland wasn't probably adopted early. Canonical/Ubuntu started a Wayland alternative called Mir (that was before Mir transformed into a Wayland compositor). And devs probably didn't want set on Wayland or Mir before knowing what will be around in the future.
If the alternative is a new system that literally does nothing? Sure!
X11 may be old and whatever you want, but it works and it's battle-tested. Wayland can't even launch a full desktop session in my machine, which is even less than the failure Pulseaudio was back in its day and that's saying something. And even if it did somehow launch, I probably would not be able to use anything serious like a media player or multiple workspaces on it.
You should read about Wayland. Doing nothing is absolutely wrong.
It doesn't work. There are parts of X11 which are broken. And you reply to a reply where I already listed 2 huge points, which are not even the only ones. And you ignore that X11/Xorg code is totally spaghetti, huge and has lot of old code that not everyone understands, because it has ton of workarounds to make it somehow half baked working on modern times. Nobody wants to work on the code, doing more than basic maintenance. And you should think about the future too, not just about yesterday and today on your personal computer. Think bigger. X11 is just not enough anymore going forward, for the next coming decades.
Are you on Gnome? Did you install Wayland on top of a running X11 system and did not configure it correctly? X11 doesn't work on my machine too, because everything is Wayland configured. So whats your point? Off course one is not a 100% replacement. There will be changes, and both are incomplete and are not working 100% perfectly. The point of Wayland is not being 100% compatible with the setup you have for Xorg/X11. There are things like reading from keyboard on any application that is running is a security risk in X11. Wayland prevents that. Which in turn means that some programs (even important ones) won't work. And they are working on a solution.
I switched to Wayland just end of last year and one of the reasons is that X11 does not handle multiple monitors well, if they have different sizes and refreshrates, especially if you add G-Sync and probably FreeSync on the other monitor. X11 is broken at that front.