Okay so Wayland is a no go and X.org is too crufty to attract contributors.... Where is the "rewrite it in rust" crowd when you need it? :)
The X11 protocol is the surface you need to maintain but swapping the internals should be do-able. Maybe we should have some call to action or reverse-auction or something. I'd love to support a viable path forward (I feel this effort would be a bit like neovim).
Personally I think it could start as a Xephyr or Xnest type project (to allow you to run rootless X) and then extend it with a from-scratch protocol that slowly replaces X (starting with support for simple but useful applications and going from there).
But clearly I only barely know what I'm talking about. Probably the reason things are the way they are is because of how the whole OpenGL / Vulcan etc. thing is not resolved, so any potential replacement has no foundation to build on (but this is something I don't know anything about).
The problem is that if you were going to rewrite a display server from scratch you would probably want to implement Wayland over X11. X11 is barely a protocol anymore because Xorg is so dominant, you either do what Xorg does bug-for-bug and with all the extensions or apps will break.
The X11 protocol is the surface you need to maintain but swapping the internals should be do-able. Maybe we should have some call to action or reverse-auction or something. I'd love to support a viable path forward (I feel this effort would be a bit like neovim).
Personally I think it could start as a Xephyr or Xnest type project (to allow you to run rootless X) and then extend it with a from-scratch protocol that slowly replaces X (starting with support for simple but useful applications and going from there).
But clearly I only barely know what I'm talking about. Probably the reason things are the way they are is because of how the whole OpenGL / Vulcan etc. thing is not resolved, so any potential replacement has no foundation to build on (but this is something I don't know anything about).