[talldayo]

It's going to be a pain-point for a while. I invite you to look on the bright side, though; the past 10 years of Wayland was as bad as it will ever get. We live in wonderful times, where Nvidia/Wayland setups are actually stable; this is stuff people thought would never get fixed 10 years ago, but now we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. There's still work to do, but I think we're passing the point where Wayland has more features than it lacks.

x11 has a place in my heart, I loved many of it's apps (shoutouts to xsnow) and cherished the wildly bloated featureset. But damn, it was broken. MacOS had a pretty terrible compositor for a while, but once you booted up Quartz with double-buffer V-sync (imagine, back in 2005) you would already know x11 was finished. Wayland was the inevitably long-winded response from the Open Source community, and while it languished for a long time it's finally quite usable.

Nobody is going to stop you from using x11, or maintaining it yourself if it comes down to it. The philosophy of the matter is decided, though; smaller featuresets are more secure and easier to implement. Especially since the advent of smartphones, I feel like the idea of an x11-native desktop metaphor has been nonsense. Yes, the GNOME pundits push this point pretty extremely, but there's a kernel of truth to it. We really do need more flexible desktop architectures if we want Linux to be a commercial-quality product. x11 is holding it back.