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I use MacOS, so I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but it seems like the foremost issue is distributions making Wayland the default before it’s ready to accept that responsibility, not with Wayland itself. That said, 17 years is a long time to wait for it to mature, so another question would be about the Wayland developers’ goals, both short and long term. Do the Wayland developers actually want to replace X11 with Wayland in large distros? If so, they need a plan to get it mature enough to do that. If not, fine, then distros need to back off and continue with X11 as the default.


I also use MacOS, but have used Linux since 1997 (way too many distros), so i hold it close to my heart.

For me the Wayland story is a great example of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

They started saying "let's rewrite from scratch, X is too complicated "; 17 years later, they have realized the reasons for all the complexity that was written during 25 years (1984 by MIT).

I guess in around 8 years we will have 2 implementations of X.


Indeed. Clean sheets of paper don’t stay clean very long in the real world. That said, in the manner of “plan to throw one away,” we can learn from our mistakes and do better the next time around. Though perhaps X10 was the one that got thrown away before X11.




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