This has been going on for at least 15 years now. I've been through multiple cycles like this with different desktop environments and GUI toolkits. The churn is even much greater in the Javascript world where if you come back to a project you haven't look at in about 3 months, the first few hours you're just busy catching up with the rest of the world.
X comes from a time when GPUs were not even a thing, it’s current role on a typical desktop is basically just to be a middleman in the communication of applications and the compositor. Wayland cuts out this middleman, fixes unfixable problems in X (you can’t have displays with different DPIs), and is backwards compatible through XWayland.
There's an implicit assumption here, that one is even using a compositing window manager. I'm guessing that you do, and that's cool -- you do you! But there are lots of people, who, when sitting down at a fresh install of any operating system, start by turning off all the 3d/transparency/drop shadow/animation/eye candy they can find. I'm one of them, and about half of my peers do as well.
The first thing I do on Android is disable all the useless (imho) animations and effects, the same on Windows (back when I used Windows), and on Debian, where I have real control, the last time I saw a compositing window manager was I think 2006. I remarked "Ok. I guess this is for people who want their Linux to look like a Mac" and then promptly removed it. I have nothing against people wanting eye candy! Eye candy sells! But... don't pretend that it's a necessary, or even important feature.
> you can’t have displays with different DPIs
This is factually not true. Right now I'm sitting in front of a thinkpad connected to two monitors, all 3 displays have different DPIs. I can drag my windows around between them just fine. Everything works. I'm happy.
What I think you mean is "Wayland supports point based instead of pixel based rendering", or "Wayland does image resampling for you, making it easier for people who don't want to use native resolution" (I don't know Wayland internals).
Anyway, I think this whole comment thread is both educational and disturbing. :/ There appears to be two camps, both of which are incorrectly assuming that everyone else thinks like them. I'm guilty of this as well. Other than the comment about security, and use on embedded environments, all of the "features" that Wayland offers (according to these comments) are, from my perspective, things I would turn off because they'd get in the way.
And I will follow your suggestion, and sometime soon set up a VM, and try to install Wayland and whatever the current whiz bang desktop environment is.
That’s just one part of what a compositor does. I assume you prefer watching videos without tearing and those are really apparent with Xorg without a compositor — something solved entirely by wayland’s “every frame is perfect”. Even on window managers like sway which has absolutely no animation or eye candy. Android also uses composition even with animations turned off.
I’m not sure we mean the same thing with multiple monitors having different DPI settings. X can’t really handle different screens — it will create a huge framebuffer of all of them together and draw on that. So if you have a high DPI and a “regular” monitor, content will appear right on the regular one, but overly small on the other. If both screens have the same DPI, X can also render at eg. at 2x size.
And thank you for trying it out, X is indeed a cool project that spanned 3 decades. But due to the very major improvements in the underlying hardware, its abstraction is simply not up to date.
Funny thing about that: if you want them to be scaled correctly based on different factors for each monitor, then you need a compositor...
About its current role, there is a famous talk by an ex-Xorg developer that explains it well. Very crudely, a wayland compositor relays events to applications, which signals when it’s ready. Xorg on the other hand does these as well, but sits between the compositor and the clients, relaying their messages with some delay (and not having a concept of every frame is perfect)
Xorg doesn’t have support for mixed-DPI monitors, as it renders to all screens simultaneously with a single DPI setting. This is pretty much unfixable, it is so inside the core of the whole thing.
And finally, Xwayland exists and it is backwards compatible to the most part (other than manipulating wayland clients as if they were x ones, but that is also a wanted “functionality”). These are pretty much just nested x servers, so I don’t see how is it false?
