[api]

From day one Wayland struck me as a completely unnecessary effort that could instead have been spent making Xorg better and fixing its problems. If aspects of Xorg are ugly, create new extensions and deprecate the old ones and set a sunset after which those old extensions will be removed. That would be a much easier sell than a 100% new graphics server.

This sort of "lets rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, ad infinitum" stuff is a major problem with the open source community. It leads to an enormous amount of wasted effort in an area where effort is always needed to address real problems around usability and hardware compatibility.

[klodolph]

X11 is too centralized. Adding more extensions exacerbates the problem—most of those extensions should have been in libraries in the first place, and with Wayland, they can finally be taken out of the server and into individual apps. That, and X11 has too many built-in assumptions which haven’t been reasonable for most users for 20 years (but it sure is nice to run X over SSH on a low-bandwidth link!)

The usability improvements on the Linux desktop happened in spite of X11. The conversation is about font rendering—and why should font rendering be a part of your windowing system? For most apps, it’s not—it’s in Pango, and Pango dropped support for X fonts. All of these changes which already happened have been eroding whatever advantages X11 offered in the first place.

So it’s time to decentralize all the random functionality in X11, and just move it into client-side libraries.

[api]

I don't get it. I don't understand why things can't be deprecated and why this requires a 100% new clean slate rewrite that actually loses functionality (the ability to run remote).

The other problem is priorities. There are a million other much higher priority things: better hardware support, better support for laptop power management, endless usability improvements to desktop apps, etc.