[zbuf]

That is to confuse "long tail" with "doesn't matter", though.

If a supermarket doesn't stock goods in the long tail, its customers shop elsewhere.

Dismiss the "long tail" and we wouldn't have champagne in the supermarket, or classical music on the radio.

The idea that somehow the ever-changing nature of Linux is going to stablise into something that satisfies _everyone_ seems misguided. Open source code means diverse groups can, and will decide themselves what's deprecated, and take on maintenance of the things they want to exist.

[bitwize]

If it costs just as much money to support the long tail as it does to support 95% of your user base, guess what? That long tail will go unsupported. This is why the only relevant web standard is "does it work on WebKit (formerly IE)?" And why the only relevant firmware standard is "does it boot Windows?" The major distros ship with Wayland. The major toolkits support Wayland. That's where all the development and maintenance energy is right now. X is still around, but eventually support for it will go away. Once it becomes niche enough that the costs of maintaining an X code path outweigh the benefits of supporting the few users still on X, they will take the X code path out. That's how things go in software.