X11 is too centralized. Adding more extensions exacerbates the problem—most of those extensions should have been in libraries in the first place, and with Wayland, they can finally be taken out of the server and into individual apps. That, and X11 has too many built-in assumptions which haven’t been reasonable for most users for 20 years (but it sure is nice to run X over SSH on a low-bandwidth link!)

The usability improvements on the Linux desktop happened in spite of X11. The conversation is about font rendering—and why should font rendering be a part of your windowing system? For most apps, it’s not—it’s in Pango, and Pango dropped support for X fonts. All of these changes which already happened have been eroding whatever advantages X11 offered in the first place.

So it’s time to decentralize all the random functionality in X11, and just move it into client-side libraries.