I'm honestly interested in building a better X11, and am willing to contribute both time and money. But first, I'd like to understand why the X11 maintainers deemed Wayland necessary -- like, what am I missing here?
Which problems, exactly, would these be? Why is it impossible (or too difficult or disruptive) to solve these problems through a server extension, or some other backwards-compatible fix? I'm sure the X.org developers have an answer, but I'm not seeing it here.
> it is highly unlikely that the major desktops are going to want to continue on that path going forward.
I don't care what other desktops and toolkits choose to do -- I don't even use a fd.o desktop (hell, I don't even run dbus). If it weren't for needing a Web browser and Zoom, I wouldn't even need a GUI at all.
I'm doing this for myself. I like UNIX a lot, but I really dislike the direction modern Linux desktops are going in. But instead of whining about it online, I'm willing to put in the time and effort to keep things working the way I like.
I'm asking what problems Wayland solves in order to figure out why it's a bad idea for me to take a crack at implementing a simple X server of my own (assuming X.org is indeed going to be deprecated). Like, what is so wrong/broken about the X11 protocol that the X.org server developers are so enthusiastic about abandoning it? Clearly, I must be missing something. I would like to know what that something is.
Side note, I don't get the hate for dbus, it's a rather simplistic message bus, orders of magnitude smaller than the X server. It would be much easier to implement your own dbus daemon for example.
Couldn't find a good article on short notice, but there's a decent video from back in 2013 about it.
I can totally get behind doing a clean re-write of X.org (possibly in a memory-safe language this time around) in order to get rid of legacy cruft that's truly no longer used. They could take the opportunity to refactor the super-popular X extensions like GLX to have better "happy paths" in order to make the overall implementation cleaner and easier to maintain. This could even be done incrementally in order to avoid breaking existing clients.
What I'm struggling to understand is what's so wrong with X11-the-protocol and the popular extensions that ditching everything was considered the best idea? Like, if the X11-to-Wayland transition were happening on the Web, it would be a lot like Google deciding to ditch HTML/CSS/Javascript in favor of something home-grown. Sure, that homegrown thing might actually be better, but it would really leave everyone else in a real lurch now, wouldn't it?
But really, most applications do not deal with Xlib or Xcb _anyway_, they are programmed at the Gui toolkit level. So all that has to be done is add another backend to the few popular toolkits in use. But guess what, Wayland supports both Xcb and Xlib protocols through a virtual X server that transparently translates to Wayland if that's what you have your heart set on.
But I have lost track of what the specific problem is you're actually trying to solve.
