> Perhaps people ought to listen to the Xorg devs when they say X11 is broken and obsolete, and you should be using Wayland instead. Every single one of them says this.

This is incorrect. Alan Coopersmith does not share this view and he is a Xorg developer. Anyone repeating this propaganda is arguing from ignorance.

That said, I have used both X11 and Wayland. X11 does its job well in many applications and honestly, we would have been better off had Wayland just been a X11 extension. As for things being broken, I have encountered far more brokenness when using Wayland than when using X11 exclusively. Wayland has gotten better of late, especially in desktop applications, but I do not consider it a replacement in general.

Just recently, I built a display based on a CM4 at work that uses X11 and I can remotely view and interact with the screen using x11vnc, which is fantastic for remote development and debugging. That is a convenience I simply do not have with Wayland. I have tried to do steam remote play by streaming from a desktop to my Steam Deck. If the desktop is running a Wayland session, a pop up appears on the physical display asking if I want to permit remote access and I currently have no way of clicking it without being physically present. This ruins the remote play experience, which I want to use when I am physically not present. A X11 session does not have this problem. If a tool like x11vnc existed for Wayland, it would be useless if it does what Steam Remote Play does with Wayland. :/

> we would have been better off had Wayland just been a X11 extension.

That would have never happened. From a functionality standpoint, Wayland is "the parts of X11 modern toolkits actually use". Give clients a buffer, have them locally render into that buffer, then composite the buffers together into a final display. Xorg can do all this. It's just a question of, do we want the maintenance burden of all the other stuff that Xorg has, like obsolete graphics primitives, obsolete visuals, etc.? And do we want the architectural decisions of X11, which seemed sensible in the 80s, but make far less sense in light of modern GPUs and modern applications with modern display needs?

The point of Wayland always was to start from scratch.