[okanat]

I think the failure wasn't Wayland itself but the failure of building another layer on top of it that unified desktop use case. Wayland could have stayed as the protocol to allocate buffer on the screen and passing events to them.

Wayland was designed by people who worked on embedded / mobile systems (some of the Xorg devs who created Wayland were MeeGo developers). It is fine to forego window management and other complex things on embedded systems and leave it to things that build upon them. For desktop another library like libdesktop-window-managment-features would be alright.

The problem arose when GNOME, with their infinite stubborn wisdom, used the lack of various desktop features in Wayland to further their mission to provide a barely functional desktop. Since they also maintain GTK / Cairo / Glib (which both Firefox and Chromium rely on to display things on Linux) everybody else was forced to obey GNOME's crappy world view.

The other DEs and toolkits are prevented from forking the entire Linux desktop environment unless they also want to foot the cost of porting both browser engines to another desktop toolkit / window management system and many popular GTK apps like Inkscape, Libreoffice and Gimp. They definitely have less funding at the moment.

All in all though, without a hard fork away from GNOME and GTK, Linux desktop systems will only cause unnecessary pain upon themselves and their users. They need to find partners like Valve (which already work with KDE) who will fund the projects and move away from GTK / Freedesktop to found something better.