I think the solution is not Wayland but an X12, that is, a protocol that solves the problems of the aging X11 protocol while also not completely breaking compatibility and requiring the use of a separate Xorg server within Wayland. I wish people had gone that way instead of fully dismissing Xorg.
I disagree and think a clean break was the way to go. X had acquired a whole lot of legacy baggage and compatibility with that should be provided by a separate piece of code.
Wayland should have been a completely new thing built with the lessons learned from X but vastly simplified for how modern display systems are actually used. Unfortunately it was built with no intent to handle many of the common use cases X already handled just fine, leaving that up to third parties to develop their own ways handling it, leading to some fragmentation (Linux really needed more fragmentation!) and very slow adoption.
A lot of this is due to a design culture that seems common around the Gnome project.
Victims of this mimetic disease have caught on to the idea that 80% of usage needs 20% of the features.
This might well be true in a literal sense, but it ignores that 99% of the users need one or two items from the remaining 80% of the features and its just a different one or two items for each user.
The result is something that isn't completely functional for all but a tiny portion of the user base. :( Workarounds exist to expand that somewhat, though they're often extremely poorly maintained.
For example, I had a gnome3 using system that suddenly started insta-crashing anytime a GTK dialog was opened on it. I eventually had to blow away all its gconf to recover it.
It turned out that at some point someone decided that 300% and 400% scaling had no purpose and caused issues because in some cases they messed up UI layout. They removed them and the removal was just shipped along with security & bugfix updates in fedora. The way it was removed caused instant crashing for people that previously had them enabled!
I'm fixed now, though with the display at 200% I have difficulty reading it (It's a 4k TV that I need to read from a long distance away) ... but since I can't use gtk interface stuff on it at all now I guess I won't be opening any bugs on minor layout issues that might be caused by increased scaling. PROBLEM SOLVED :(
The big mistake with W was leaving so much of function specification to the implementor. W was a spec, but totally incomplete for what was needed to build a usable power user desktop. The Linux DE landscape was already fractured to the degree of inefficiency for such a small user base, and with W this fracture actually deepened due to the Great Unsharing of implementation details. Nothing global. Everything local, from decorations to whatnot. Now, besides competing implementations of an entire display server stack, you have the huge communications & politics overhead between the camps that is required to agree on such simple "protocols" like "inhibit screensaver start" (the "idle-inhibit wars") --- not a good use of resources.
I think the future of X11 will be that if a vendor --- likely Nvidia --- sees any point in it down the road, they'll fork Xorg and provide, complete with their own driver bundle, the display server.
For now, no vendor of drivers like Nvidia is likely to be concerned about X11 stabilizing because that's less toil for them to keep their drivers stable on Linux. They are busy enough with keeping up with the Linux kernel breaking their stuff every release <--- not a great advertisement for vendors to even support Linux; looked the same with X11 to me during the 2008-2015 period. Changing X11 was not economical to support without a great justification.
Some software is finished --- maybe it's time to call X11 finished.
With W I assume you mean Wayland? You comment is confusing because the W Window System [1] is in fact the predecessor of X11 and that's what I thought you were referring to.
Those standards need to exist, but those standards do not need to exist as part of the display protocol.
People make this mistake over and over and over. Nothing prevents the compositor writers from deciding on a common API for screenshots and similar things (and there has been movement in this direction)
Wayland is in many ways the exact opposite of X design principles. It's a giant rebellious-teenager "fuck you, daddy!" to X11, not really a successor. A successor technology would be great.
