I enjoyed the article but this quote jumped out at me: "What took thirty years to build isn't going to be replaced in a day." This was in regard to replacing X11 with Wayland. It's funny because it would be closer to the truth to say that X11 took 5 years to build, and for the last 25 years everyone has been trying to get off of it, but in the meantime piling more stuff on top of it since that's easier than starting from scratch. 25 years ago there were people saying stuff like, "I wish we had something else, but this is what we're stuck with, and it's just too much work to make a new window system, so let's just add another protocol extension."
So we're already 25 years into trying to replace X11, which is already far longer than the period of time in which it was being designed and actively developed on a foundational level. There's got to be some good lessons learned in all of this about software lifecycles or getting it right the first time or knowing when to move on or OS development by way of mailing list consensus. I totally get why it's still used after all these years, it performs an essential task- but I bet the original creators would be the ones most shocked that it's still a thing in 2019.
So we're already 25 years into trying to replace X11, which is already far longer than the period of time in which it was being designed and actively developed on a foundational level. There's got to be some good lessons learned in all of this about software lifecycles or getting it right the first time or knowing when to move on or OS development by way of mailing list consensus. I totally get why it's still used after all these years, it performs an essential task- but I bet the original creators would be the ones most shocked that it's still a thing in 2019.