This isn't a great argument. Python has "plugins" and just calls them "C extensions". Every time someone uses Numpy, Matplotlib, Pandas, or even just "math" - that's a plugin.

Gimp has plugins. Emacs has plugins. VLC has plugins.

> The technical debt of Xorg is almost like if Linux never supported anything but x86 and used emulators for all other hardware.

It's not like that at all.

I can believe that WordPress is a bunch of gross PHP, and I can believe that nobody wants to maintain the C in Xorg, but that's about as far as your analogy holds.

And besides, Wayland is just going to package all that stuff you hate into XWayland. It's not like anyone is cleaning up the interface and removing the notion of plugins.

Nobody is saying that Xorg isn't old and crap, or that it shouldn't be replaced: I remember being pretty excited when I first heard about weyland - it sounded like it was going to solve a bunch of problems.

I was excited, so I jumped on my triceratops and went over to see my friend Ug. I didn't hang out in Ug's cave very often because it was kind of messy and his sabretooth wasn't very friendly, but I'd read a thing about weyland and I was all excited.

Ug was less excited than I, he pointed out that X has been a thing for a long time, and there will be a billion assumptions about its architecture in all kinds of weird places, and switching to an entirely new thing that isn't really backwards compatible will likely cause a bunch of issues, and that there's some software out there that's targeting X, unmaintained, and still in use by people, and a bunch of this software will break. And that these wayland people will have to do a lot of thinking about all kinds of weird edge cases, like remote X sessions, multi-window applications, screensavers / lockers, windows with transparency or non-rectangular shapes, etc etc etc. He pointed out that even if you do spend a lot of time being super diligent about something like this, such a large fundamental change is still very likely to cause a bunch of weird edge cases in the real world that will break people's workflow.

My concern is more around timelines and the issues it will cause when it is forced on people, not "this is bad/unnecessary". I don't think I've ever seen anyone make that argument about X.

Some of us just want to have working systems, get stuff done, and keep using the great software we've been using for decades without problems.

I mostly just hope redhat have learned from the experiences we had with things like pulseaudio, and that they've checked whether the replacement actually works in real-world scenarios before forcing it on people this time.

Eventually, everyone involved knows, it's time. And even Linux has had some major rewrites in multiple areas - don't pretend like Linux hasn't changed immensely since 1.0. Xorg though... hasn't that much...

Heck, there's nothing wrong using anything anywhere, it's a question of fulfilling the requirements.

Meanwhile, you in another comment:

> You can use `xdpyinfo` yourself to see all the extensions you have loaded.

So, which one is it? Is it unchanging or is it evolved through several extensions?

As for the quality of the code, all you need to do is read the discussions by Xorg maintainers about the quality of Xorg's code back when Wayland was beginning development. You will not find even one optimistic take. There was even an early attempt to fork Xorg and fix it (called X12), but it was quickly abandoned as unfixable.

Note, also, that these discussions began in 2010. More than half a decade before Flatpak or Snap. Work had begun to replace the mess before we were even talking about sandboxing.

You do realize that Xorg has "plugins" since Redhat (freedesktop) took control of it. In the past, xterm, twm, etc, were part of the X server distribution. They split it "to make maintenance easier". What they actually achived was a running target. Why is my new X server no longer loading my old fonts ?