This is an interesting dichotomy. Alternatively just keep using X until 2030-2040. If X does everything you presently care for well and major apps like gimp and firefox are apt to support X for the next decade+ an alternative contribution might be bug fixes for X or packaging for distros that opt to continue to support it.

When about do you think firefox will no longer build for X?

Python 3 was ready in 2008 but 2 will be supported by RHEL until at least 2024 16 years later. I will be surprised if in 2030 I can't simply pick distro with X and fire up firefox. Its kind of silly to expect users who are disinterested in using foo to pitch in to make foo acceptable when said users really want bar because you tell them that bar is now the standard "get over it".

Or, we could just use X if it still works for us. I don't need any "more powerful and knowledgeable forces" to tell me what works for me and what doesn't.

I'd like to use Wayland. But there's no replacement to my bspwm+picom setup that works with a little configuration. Tough luck, guess I won't be using Wayland for now.

This is an interesting dichotomy. Alternatively just keep using X until 2030. If X does everything you presently care for well and major apps like gimp and firefox are apt to support X for the next decade an alternative contribution might be bug fixes for X or packaging for distros that opt to continue to support it.

When about do you think firefox will no longer build for X?

Python 3 was ready in 2008 but 2 will be supported by RHEL until at least 2024 16 years later. I will be surprised if in 2030 I can't simply pick distro with X and fire up firefox.

The other option is to maintain X. I'm not interested in that, and since thise who have done that in the past agree Wayland is the future I'm cautiously going to trust them and so I'll transition my systems to Wayland (if they are still x).

> Nobody is arguing that X.org's server will disappear from the face of the earth.

Actually, that's exactly one of the major reasons put forth for switching to Wayland. The very comment you replied to quotes it:

>>> a major maintainer of X server telling you he's not going to work to maintain the project anymore

If the project ends up truly unmaintained, it really would end up disappearing from the face of the earth as the platform under it (the hardware, the kernel, etc.) changes to the point that it becomes non-functional.

That's precisely what people are arguing. That's precisely what Kristian Høgsberg wanted from the get-go: for X to simply go away, except as a compatibility layer for "legacy applications". (And I bet Xwayland will eventually be deprecated and unsupported, except for Red Hat's government clients or something.) X has been quasi-officially deprecated for years now, with Wayland offered as its replacement.

> My opinion - today - is that X doesn't work on laptops where the user expects to use a touchpad. Nor does it work on a laptop with a resolution that requires scaling (at least not the second you plug in another display).

None of those issues actually make X unusable. And I say that while writing this on an X1 Carbon running Debian testing using X in a multi-monitor setup (and yes, this is a totally plug-and-play setup with zero monkeying around in config files... a fact that, frankly, amazes me, having grown up hacking X modelines).

Wayland, by contrast, is literally unusable (as in, it lacks fundamental features that make it something people can't use) in many circumstances due to either compositor bugs, features that don't work by design, or features that don't work due to a lack of solutions or a lack of adoption of those solutions.

And I know this because I've tried to use it. I really like the possibilities it opens up.

But it's so far from mature, at this point, that it simply cannot act as an X replacement for most people.

Frankly, I'm a little shocked distros are making Wayland their default display server ecosystem, as it's an objective step backward for desktop Linux and I expect will scare a lot of neophytes away who wonder why the hell basic features like screensharing still don't yet work in their favourite application.

> My opinion - today - is that X doesn't work on laptops where the user expects to use a touchpad.

My touchpads work very well with X, out of the box (any Ubuntu I used.) HP ZBook 15 from 2014 and a HP nc8430 from 2006.

> Nor does it work on a laptop with a resolution that requires scaling (at least not the second you plug in another display).

I can't comment on this. The few times I added another display it wasn't larger than the usual 1920x1080 px.