An X12 was briefly considered by the community before adopting Wayland: https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/

If you take the time to read through that (very partial) list of cruft and footguns in X11 it probably makes it a little easier to understand why a clean-slate approach was able to attract momentum and why many hands-on involved developers were relatively tired of X11. Critics would of course respond that backwards compatibility is worth the effort and rewrites are often the wrong call, etc. It's the Python 2/3 debate and many others.

Be the change you want to see.

Also happy winter solstice.

The fact that you can "assume Vulkan exists" helps a lot (both hardware and software renderers exist). Do remember--Wayland predates Vulkan by almost a full decade.

In addition, you can offload OpenGL compatibility to Zink (again leaning into Vulkan).

> pull in a group of long term maintainers.

"Use new cool language" seems to be a prerequisite for this nowadays ...

At least Zig is very compatible with C.

I don't know about other DE, but at least with Plasma there is a "overscan" option to compensate for hidden borders.

It's not technically behind on window positioning. Rather, it was a deliberate choice not to support it. You can very reasonably object to that, but it is sorta a necessary measure to prevent clickjacking.

lol

Windows in early 2000s didn't even detect your early 2000s SATA drive

Windows in early 2023 didn't even detect the network card it needed to download network card drivers. After changing mobos I needed to boot into linux to download network drivers for windows...

Windows in early 2025 still uses SCSI emulation to talk with NVMe and only now the server part got a proper driver

Windows in early 2025s still need virtio driver injection to boot properly as a VM without IDE emulation

"Drivers working out of the box" were never windows strong part

Unless you needed a SATA driver not included in the installer because you wanted to avoid a legacy IDE emulation for your disks.

I use Linux on the desktop since 1997, and there was no point where Windows was even slightly more attractive.

I don't know what "prime time" means here.

edit: apart from, you know. Applications and drivers for random hardware.

Nope, Macs were expensive stuff games did not run on, and linux was just not pushed by near anyone.

It was not a war "which desktop is easier to use", it was "which system can run stuff I need". And if "the need" was "video games and office stuff", your only choice was windows.

The average user only cares what they can run on the desktop. Linux did not have as much choice back then.

Windows is reasonably OK, but MacOS' window management has always been really terrible.

Just think through the many different iterations over the years of what the green button on the deco does, which still isn't working consistently, same as double-clicking the title bar. Not to mention that whatever the Maximize-alike is that you can set title bar double click too (the options being Zoom and Fill, buried in settings somewhere) is different from dragging the title bar against the top of the screen and chosing single tile. Which is different from Control-Clicking the green button. Maybe. It depends on the app.

What a mess.

Both of them miss (without add-ons) convenience niche features I cherish, such as the ability to pin arbitrary windows on-top, but at least the basics in Windows work alright and moreover predictably and reliabily. Window management in MacOS just feels neglected and broken.

There may be many other ways in which MacOS shines as a desktop OS, and certainly in terms of display server tech it has innovated by going compositing first, but the window manager is bizarrely bad.

I don't use a Mac, but have you ever used Windows?

I mean, maybe you have, but if you are not fussy then at worst MacOS is quirky and Windows and Linux are identical and merely have different icons.

If you pay a little bit of attention you will notice that on linux things seem more flexible and intuitive.

If you are very finnicky, there is nothing that comes close to X11 window managers when it comes to window management flexibility, innovation and power.