@“allewyn” #p4036
The producer of the video largely confirms the concern I am raising. The Wayland ecosystem still lacks the kind of stable, cross compositor standards that a display system requires in order to be predictable and long lived.
Much of the functionality that applications and desktop environments relied on in X11 is now fragmented across compositor specific protocols, extensions, and policy decisions. Instead of one well understood contract between applications and the display server, we now have many partial contracts that differ depending on compositor, toolkit, and environment.
By the time these gaps are fully standardized, if that ever happens, it is entirely plausible that another windowing or presentation model will already be emerging. This is not hypothetical. We have seen this cycle repeatedly in graphics stacks over the last three decades.
Which raises a practical question. Why move away from X11 at all, if it already satisfies the requirements of most real world use cases?
Wayland is better in some areas, particularly security boundaries and modern rendering assumptions, but it is not categorically better. It replaces a mature, well specified system with one that is still evolving, still incomplete, and still pushing complexity upward into toolkits and compositors.
From an engineering standpoint, that is not a clear win. It is a tradeoff. And for many users and systems, it is a tradeoff that does not yet justify the disruption.
In short, Wayland is partially better, but not universally better. That distinction matters when stability, predictability, and long term maintenance are the goals.
