this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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The appeal to "X11 is too complicated, Wayland is much simpler" ain't holding much meat when we are 15 years into the project and it's still not done. As it turns out, a lot of that "junk" in X11 is rather useful and cutting out the junk in Wayland just made it unusable. The work to reimplement the missing functionality has been eating up a lot of years.
That is true that Wayland has cost a lot of time already, much longer than anticipated. Still, Wayland has the organic growth. X11 is declining and will go eventually.
There's a reason every single X11 dev decided it would be better to start from scratch than to continue developing X, it's just fundamentally broken in ways that can't be fixed, and very few devs were interested in doing the work to make wayland happen until recently, the growth has been massive for development.