[flohofwoe]

> Because developing Xorg is a massive pain in the butt.

That's really no reason to build an entirely new system, and then half-ass it the way Wayland did. The Wayland gang should have started with a new, modernized, cleaned up window system API running as a layer on top of X11 and then start replacing the cruft piece by piece while keeping both the original X11 API and the new API working all the time, basically build the whole project from the user perspective (both 'regular' Linux users and programmers who need to build Linux apps).

I guess though the main problem is that feature parity with X11 wasn't even a design goal, they intentionally threw out the baby with the bathwater, and also intentionally fragmented the Linux desktop even more. It almost smells like sabotage (at least self-sabotage).

Also, it's been 17 years since Wayland was released, that's as if X11 would have barely started to become usable by around 2005.

[veeti]

> It almost smells like sabotage (at least self-sabotage).

See also: Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, KDE 4... all widely panned by their most loyal users. 2010s were the lost decade of Linux.

[johnny22]

there were many of us who really liked gnome 3 though. Not that it was issue free, but the workflow was very appealing.

[veeti]

Sure, I quite enjoy it myself now. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't borderline unusable for years.

[stinkbeetle]

It's not sabotage or self-sabotage, implying some intention behind it. It's just classic second system syndrome: hyper-fixating on real or perceived flaws that were never able to be solved or done right in the previous system, which can be to the detriment of other considerations.