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Developers willing/able to work on X11/Wayland plumbing are a (very) finite number. A single developer can have a large impact. With more of them switching their primary efforts to Wayland, the past few years have seen large improvements in the landscape, and this trend is bound to continue.

Granted, there are rough edges, and I wouldn't claim any Wayland compositor is as polished as an X11 one -- but we're not that far off, and for many people the benefits of running a Wayland session today outweigh the cons.




The thing is, that's also been true since at least 2015 - the claim is that Xorg is dead and all the devs who were working on it are on Wayland now and it'll be working any day now. And that's been the claim for at least the 5 years that I've been following it. And in fairness, they have made progress in that time - by the time Wayland is as old as Xorg, it might even reach feature parity!


To make the comparison closer to apples-to-apples, the Wayland analog to the Xorg server would be something like GNOME's mutter compositor, which had its first Wayland support out in 2013[1] -- 7 years ago. And the rate of progress has only sped up since then -- take a Wayland compositor from a year ago and compare it to the same one today, and things tend to be much more polished.

[1]: judging by https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland




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