The major comitters and maintainers of X decided it was a lost cause and unfixable.

Were they just supposed to keep working on the massive pile of hacks they felt needed abandoning?

They did what they thought was best. You hate it. Fine.

Do you think things would be better if they kept working on the unfixable mess?

I trust them to know what was going on better than random commenters.

That is fine. X11 needed fresh start. But they also failed to learn any lessons from X, just assuming "if X11 did it it must've been a bad idea, let's do it differently".

X11 did chalk many lines of abstractions in absolutely the right places, it's just the implementation was crufty in places, and just not designed for modern hardware in some other places, while wayland just tried to kick as much as possible to the WM side, making it so instead one place where those things need a bunch of code (the display system/its plugins), now every WM have to repeat that work and (more importantly) add incompatibilities because of that

Anecdotal evidence: when using X11 years ago I could never avoid screen tearing despite trying various options, except with one option that seemed to replace it with random frame drops. (to be fair that's probably related to my GPU, which is also the reason why I could not use wayland for so long)

Wayland just fixed all that, making it at least usable for multimedia/gaming use with my GPU.

Data point: On my current and previous work laptops (iGPU ThinkPads) I switched from the default Wayland back to X11 because of various bugs (hangs, stutters, resume failures), in X11 they don't happen, seems to work flawlessly.

Sometimes it's worse to live in a mess that is being constantly fixed I guess.

I'm just lurking in the comments with popcorn, but if what you said is true and the maintainers of X decided it was a lost cause and unfixable, well that is the most informed opinion of them all. Nobody knows better then the maintainers. Sure, the replacement might have feature gaps initially but that is a transient issue.

This is true, and it is also true that the maintainers of Wayland have done a terrible job of developing the replacement. It is mostly good enough now to replace X11, but based on what I've seen reported about different features, they frequently let "perfect be the enemy of done" when it comes to implementing critical features. I mean, just look at the drama around remembering the position of a window, its absolutely ridiculous that after years they haven't picked a "good enough" direction and implemented it.

The people behind Plan 9 did a much better job than was done with X11 and that was completely ignored as a path forward from what I can tell.

It’s tiny, secure, graphics subsystem independent (it’ll work on just about anything with or without a GPU, I would expect, given the API is so damn simple) and already designed.

Maybe it wouldn’t work, but I bet it would have.

> They did what they thought was best.

My problem with it is their proxy for "best" seemed to be "opposite of X11." This was not a solid engineering choice, and I think this post is trying to demonstrate, that had costs.

I'd probably be completely fine with Wayland if it didn't have this obsession with military style desktop security. If it was as open as extensible as X11 by default then we all would have switched. X11 isn't pretty to write code for, but when it works, it works exceptionally well. Wayland seems to have made the wrong sacrifices where it mattered most.

I believe most of the original committers and maintainers of X are long gone, if still around they could very well be in their late 70s and 80s.

I would agree if you said many of the Wayland Developers people started with Xfee86. But I think the 'complexity' of X has to do with the fact no one of this generation fully understand why X11 did things the way they did, so Wayland was started. That is OK, but here we are.

I think the main issue is proprietary video companies did not to release their specs. I think if the Wayland people told the GPU Companies (like Nvidia) they will not support your hardware unless you release full specs, they would be further along.

OpenBSD is getting along fine without companies like Nvidia, I wish Linux and Wayland would tell these companies their GPUs will never be supported until full documentation is provided.