flubba86, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

The Devs who work on X are doing an amazing job

There aren’t any Devs working on X. That’s the whole problem. Xorg is the most modern and most popular implementation of X, was started in 2004, it no longer has any permanent maintainers, and it hasn’t been updated since 2018. Nobody alive fully understands the whole codebase, it is an unholy mess of multiple forks and multiple versions of many different projects all smushed together. There is no more room for innovation on Xorg because any time anybody fixes a bug or adds a feature, it breaks something totally unrelated. All of the big players who used to pay developers to maintain it, no longer do. Partly because they can’t find anyone willing to do it.

I’m not saying Wayland is the answer to the problem. Building a new display server protocol does not fix the problems with Xorg, and it has its own slew of problems. It really is a “rock and a hard place” situation. You’re a future-hating troglodyte who shuns innovation if you continue to use Xorg, and you’re a risk-taking early-adopter who forfeits functionality for shiny new toys, if you use Wayland.