> This is classic second-system thinking. 'This time we'll do everything right! This time we'll write it without any bugs!'
This is exactly what I'm afraid of. Don't get me wrong, I go outside for a smoke every morning when I find out I have to as much as look at X code that day (fortunately, it doesn't happen too often), but you know what, X11 works. It has, furthermore, worked reliably for many, many years, on more architectures than I can name, running more applications than anyone can remember, and has reliably solved problems that no one even conceived of thirty years ago when X11 was written. For something that "barely holds together", it works admirably well for the end user, and the nowadays-hated extensibility and policy-but-not-mechanism have allowed it to remain a very useful solution.
Wayland, in contrast, is universally applauded, but largely runs Gnome and a bunch of infotainment systems for automotive applications.
X11 has also not always been so reliable, and frankly, I doubt Wayland will take much less time to become reliable. It took about 10 years for X11 to stop being a pain in the ass. I'm looking forward to using Wayland every day. In 2025 or so.
Also, at the risk of looking like someone who wears his tinfoil hat to bed, it's worth considering that the two major improvements are largely relevant only for multimedia-super-heavy stuff and staying relatively safe from a legal standpoint while running 3rd party, untrusted (cough usually closed source cough) applications on a system that you manufacture and sell (oh, and a lot of people who want to move every application in the browser, but that could be solved by just sandboxing the browser). Before jumping into the PR boat and proclaiming the end of The Dreadful X11 Insecurity, it may be worth following the money trail.
This is exactly what I'm afraid of. Don't get me wrong, I go outside for a smoke every morning when I find out I have to as much as look at X code that day (fortunately, it doesn't happen too often), but you know what, X11 works. It has, furthermore, worked reliably for many, many years, on more architectures than I can name, running more applications than anyone can remember, and has reliably solved problems that no one even conceived of thirty years ago when X11 was written. For something that "barely holds together", it works admirably well for the end user, and the nowadays-hated extensibility and policy-but-not-mechanism have allowed it to remain a very useful solution.
Wayland, in contrast, is universally applauded, but largely runs Gnome and a bunch of infotainment systems for automotive applications.
X11 has also not always been so reliable, and frankly, I doubt Wayland will take much less time to become reliable. It took about 10 years for X11 to stop being a pain in the ass. I'm looking forward to using Wayland every day. In 2025 or so.
Also, at the risk of looking like someone who wears his tinfoil hat to bed, it's worth considering that the two major improvements are largely relevant only for multimedia-super-heavy stuff and staying relatively safe from a legal standpoint while running 3rd party, untrusted (cough usually closed source cough) applications on a system that you manufacture and sell (oh, and a lot of people who want to move every application in the browser, but that could be solved by just sandboxing the browser). Before jumping into the PR boat and proclaiming the end of The Dreadful X11 Insecurity, it may be worth following the money trail.