>I just had the dispiriting thought that it's about twenty years since I first used Ubuntu. At that point it all seemed tantalizingly close to being "ready for primetime".

I feel the same and find it a bit strange. I am happy with hyprland on wayland since a few months back but somehow it reminds me of running enlightenment or afterstep in the 90s. My younger self would have expected at least a decade of "this is how the UI works in Linux and it's great" by now.

Docker and node both got started after wayland and they are mature enterprise staples. What makes wayland such a tricky problem?