Taking the proposition as true, what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"? I am asking this in good faith, I literally naively do not understand what the "bad" bit is.

Like, ok, its 2030 and X11 is dead, no one works on it anymore and 90% of Linux users use Wayland, what did they gain? I know they did employ Pottering but not anymore, and AFAIK they contribute a non-trivial amount of code up stream to, Linux, Gnome? KDE? If more users are on wayland they can pressure Gnome to ... what?

I sort of get an argument around systemd and this, in that they can push I guess their target feature sets into systemd and force the rest of the eco-system to follow them, but, well I guess I don't get that argument either, cause they can already put any special sauce they want in Redhat's shipped systemd implementation and if its good it will be picked up, if its bad it wont be?

I guess, if Redhat maintains systemd & wayland, then they could choke out community contributions by ignoring them or whatever, but wouldn't we just see forks? Arch would just ship with cooler-systemd or whatever?

Redhat gains at least a few things...

- Maintaining X requires a lot of time, expertise and cost, it's a hard codebase to work with, deprecating X saves them money

- Wayland is simpler and achieves greater security by eliminating features of the desktop that most users value, but perhaps Redhat's clients in security-conscious fields like healthcare, finance and government are willing to live without

So I suspect it comes down to saving money and delivering something they have more control of which is more tailored to their most lucrative enterprise scenarios; whereas X is an old mess of cranky unix guys and their belligerent libre cruft.

There are some parallels to systemd I guess, in that its design rejected the Unix philosophy, and this was a source of concern for a lot of people. Moreover at the time systemd was under development, my impression of Poettering was that he was as incompetent as he was misguided and belligerent - he was also advocating for abandoning POSIX compatibility, and PulseAudio was the glitchiest shit on my desktop back then. But in the end systemd simply appeared on my computer one day and nothing got worse, and that is the ultimate standard. If they forced wayland on me tomorrow something on my machine would break (this is the main point of the OP), and they've had almost 20 years to fix that but it may arguably never get fixed due to Wayland's design. So Wayland can go the way of the dodo as far as I'm concerned.

> ...what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"?

The same goal any group of savvy corporate employees has when their marquee project has proved to be far more difficult, taken way longer, and required far more resources than anticipated to get within artillery distance of its originally-stated goal?

I've personally seen this sort of thing play out several times during my tenure in the corporate environment.

Cant Edit: I mention Pottering above because I remember similar arguments against his stuff (that I also never really fully understood in terms of "end game"), not because I have personal animosity against him or his projects or want to hold him up as "example of what can go wrong".