If Wayland is the future, then the future was 12 years ago.
Since it hasn't really caught on or solved the same problems that X.Org accomplished a long time ago, it seems kind of pointless to continue pursuing it at this point. In my opinion, the best thing about X.Org is that it's no longer changing. I remember installing updates for X.Org all the time and booting to a black screen on multiple occasions.
The issue is trying to implement a radical change in the userspace Linux ecosystem. It's not possible without a ton of effort, so it takes an incredible amount of time, sweat and tears. That's the reason it takes 12 years and counting.
The utopian philosophy of "Linux is about choice" has doomed any idea of a Linux desktop.
> The utopian philosophy of "Linux is about choice" has doomed any idea of a Linux desktop.
If it isn't about "choice" - ie. user control and freedom - then what is the point of using Linux in the first place and not stick with Windows where things are already chosen for you and way more often than not work out of the box because it is by far the most tested against desktop environment?
Libre/open source is the point. Not being restricted by proprietary software and walled gardens.
The only truly successful open source software running on a Linux system is the kernel, because there's NO choice. No talented teenager can write their own Linux kernel that does Y instead. Imagine what would the world look like if there were 50 half compatible, community-managed forks of the Linux kernel.
The year of the Linux desktop won't come because apart from the kernel the ecosystem is incredibly fragmented and reaching consensus is pretty much impossible, so in 2020 we're still deciding whether to do client side or server side decorations.
> Libre/open source is the point. Not being restricted by proprietary software and walled gardens.
And the point of libre/open is the word from FLOSS you forgot to add: freedom, ie. being in a position to decide and control your software.
Libre/open/free software isn't an end goal by themselves, they the means to be in control.
> The year of the Linux desktop won't come because apart from the kernel the ecosystem is incredibly fragmented and reaching consensus is pretty much impossible
Until Wayland came along, X11 was the only defacto window system for Linux - if you wrote an application targeting X11, it would work on all Linux desktop system.
Wayland fragmented the window system landscape.
> so in 2020 we're still deciding whether to do client side or server side decorations.
This wasn't a question at the past, everyone agreed that server side decorations are better because they allow users more control through their window managers - with exception for special cases, of course (the WMs didn't forbid it after all, applications could do both).
It wasn't until some GNOME "designer" saw iPad, got jealous they didn't thought of it and then mad that people could actually have choice in how their Linux systems looked and behaved that we got client side decorations.
Since it hasn't really caught on or solved the same problems that X.Org accomplished a long time ago, it seems kind of pointless to continue pursuing it at this point. In my opinion, the best thing about X.Org is that it's no longer changing. I remember installing updates for X.Org all the time and booting to a black screen on multiple occasions.