As a complete outsider - ok, I'm a developer, but I haven't had the pleasure (?) of writing something that interfaces directly with Xorg yet - I have been reading for years about Wayland being the way forward and how Xorg is dragged down by a long history of dubious design decisions and features nobody needs anymore, and I was secretly wondering: if this is really the future of desktop Linux, why doesn't it gain more momentum?
This post is a bit too ranty for its own good, but it has a valid point, and one that is unfortunately common in the open source community: because you have no monetary obligation to your "customers" (=users), there's not really a lot that forces you to maintain backwards compatibility. And because a Linux distro is made up of thousands of applications, many of them not in active development anymore, changing such a fundamental component (without providing a "compatibility layer", which I have no idea if it would be even possible) will break a lot of applications that may never be "fixed".
This post is a bit too ranty for its own good, but it has a valid point, and one that is unfortunately common in the open source community: because you have no monetary obligation to your "customers" (=users), there's not really a lot that forces you to maintain backwards compatibility. And because a Linux distro is made up of thousands of applications, many of them not in active development anymore, changing such a fundamental component (without providing a "compatibility layer", which I have no idea if it would be even possible) will break a lot of applications that may never be "fixed".