Wayland was never going to be fully Xorg compatible. It's not just that it would be a massive effort, but it conflicts with core Wayland concepts relating to isolation and security. If keystroke access and window properties were still a free-for-all like on x11, we'd be back around to building on an imperfect protocol. Distros and desktops can build around those insecure concepts if they want (KDE has options for some of them), but it doesn't make sense to include it as part of the protocol.
The discussion is circular, and it ultimately amounts to a lot of dissatisfaction on either side. People should use what they want to use and support what they're capable of supporting. Neither x11 or Wayland are going away, so we need less of the "make Wayland more like x11" and "make x11 more like Wayland" bandwagoning.
I have to admit that I find the isolation and security design to be rather strange. Isolating graphical applications requires a lot of pieces, one of which (what Wayland did) is preventing them from poking at other applications via the GUI. It requires isolating them in the backend (out of scope for Wayland, but Flatpak is at least trying). But it also requires preventing them from spoofing each other and thus deliberately confusing the user. This seems like it needs UI enforced on top of the isolated applications, which means drawing them in a box (like a nested compositor, at which point none of what Wayland did to isolate applications matters) or enforcing informative window decorations. And that part seems like it requires server-side decorations, but Wayland is allergic to SSD.
So I don’t get it. How exactly is the core Wayland protocol a good base for the GUI parts of isolation?
You can render decorations server-side, it's just not guaranteed that the client will respect it. If you really want a Qubes-style SSD desktop, it's attainable in Wayland although it will look incredibly ugly and be highly redundant. Good luck pitching that to GNOME and KDE devs as a default.
So... I don't see how the isolation design is strange. Wayland makes sure that windows are individually isolated, and Flatpak/Bubblewrap isolates the backend and provides interaction portals. It's not a perfect solution, but it does stop your timer application from being a secret keylogger. If your biggest concern is a Trojan horse attack, it sounds to me like Wayland did what it set out to do.
> Wayland was never going to be fully Xorg compatible.
Maybe not, but the fact that Wayland doesn't support an important use case for me is why, regardless of any benefits Wayland may have over X, I won't be using Wayland.
> Neither x11 or Wayland are going away
I sure hope this is the case. I don't care if Wayland exists, I worry that it will become the only realistic option.
> regardless of any benefits Wayland may have over X, I won't be using Wayland.
That's fine. I don't really know what your 'mystery feature' is, but I feel pretty certain it's on a Wayland roadmap somewhere. The same cannot be said for new features in x11.
> I don't care if Wayland exists, I worry that it will become the only realistic option.
It is the only realistic option, if you care about security and isolation. x11 is very flexible and fun, but it's not surprising that the people taking the Linux desktop seriously are pushing for Wayland. It sucks that you're unable to use it for whatever reason, but people aren't going to reallocate development resources to give a dying protocol new features.
> people aren't going to reallocate development resources to give a dying protocol new features.
Which is actually fine by me. I don't need it to have new features.
My point isn't that X is better or worse than Wayland -- clearly the answer to that question is "it depends". I was just expressing the concern that Wayland may eventually become mandatory.
I respect their internals discussion, but they had only three user facing issues & I think all of them have been either fully or partially addressed. Screen recording for example has been reasonably well addressed for well over a year, and protocols for it have existed for a while.
Also it is again the rules to backhandedly ask "Did you read the article." Please read the guidelines.