xorg-devel has always been a relatively slow mailing list, and very little new R&D has been done on the X server for the past 5 years or so. Latest I can think of is the DRM lease work, which is still ongoing.
Wayland was at least started by people frustrated with the real problems in X. (unlike most other replace X projects I've seen over the last 20 years where were someone who had no idea what is really wrong proposing a solution that didn't solve the real problems.
Many of whom, it's worth pointing out, are themselves the core Xorg developers who don't want to be stuck maintaining Xorg forever.
I'm very fond of old software that has been battle tested, rather than jumping on the bandwagon of the newest thing which is invariably rough around the edges.
Just look at the terminal latency of Wayland default compositor vs X, or 3D performance with NVIDIA, or weird configuration - it doesn't work as good as the old thing
> terminal latency of Wayland default compositor vs X
I'm not sure what you mean by "default compositor" — Weston? — and what's "X" — Xorg without any compositor, with the Windows 95-esque situation of everything drawing into one buffer?
Yeah, you can decrease latency by a tiny bit by not compositing at all, but the result is totally unacceptable visually. People generally don't want to look at Windows 95 anymore.
It is perfectly acceptable to me.
And this is the issue with Wayland vs X11 when it comes to compositing: Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it.
(though this isn't the only problem Wayland has... and FWIW Windows 95 is in many fronts superior to any desktop you can find on Linux)
Most users want a UI from $CURRENT_YEAR, not one that makes them think of Spice Girls songs and AOL Instant Messenger.
> Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it.
X11 is architecturally ill suited to a compositing environment. Inasmuch as compositing solutions exist, they are janky hacks that introduce more processes, more context switches on the hot path, and more latency than Wayland, which was based on $CURRENT_DECADE graphical principles from the ground up.
Sometimes you can't square the circle and engineer a general solution. Sometimes you have to engineer for the common case only. For desktop usage, the common case is "user who is used to Windows or macOS and does not want to regress backward in terms of UI". For such users, a noncomposited Windows 9x-like desktop is unacceptable. A broken, laggy, hard-to-maintain pile of hacks is also unacceptable. Wayland solves both those problems, which is why virtually ALL of the hackers working on the Linux graphics stack have jumped ship from X to Wayland. Like it or not, you will eventually be using Wayland too.
This is rather incorrect assumption. UIs is not something people want, it's something people want to not to get in their way, i.e. the opposite of wanting. And to your example modern Gnome is actually worse than AOL times UIs, it breaks a lot of expectations users used to Mac or Windows have, with proper menus not hidden away and better workflows.
> And to your example modern Gnome is actually worse than AOL times UIs
Totally true, the amount of missing functionality and weird behavior is huge. Yet I do prefer it to KDE as it is in practice more pleasant to look at.
Apparently there are patches on the way [1] that try to mitigate the severe design flaws of wayland in that regard. If wayland will ever reach X11-like performance remains to be seen. Right now this is not the case.
[1]: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/commit/?id=df209...
You seem to broadly misunderstand several parts of the modern display architecture -- the goal you insist any sane window system should provide hasn't been provided by any, including the X Window System.
"X11 is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces" as the old unix hater book said decades ago.
Notably, I think you still can't get hardware acceleration under Wayland for nvidia cards, making it unusable. Yeah that's nvidia's "fault" but to the end user it makes no difference if they upgrade their distro, the distro switches from Xorg to Wayland, and suddenly their computer sucks.
Nvidia wrote patches for GNOME and KDE to support their crappy custom EGLStreams thing alongside the usual GBM. I think GNOME and KDE have accepted them.
However, xfwm (the window manager) will also need to be ported to Wayland — i.e. become a Wayland compositor — which will probably be a more complicated undertaking, as "xfwm-wayland will need to fulfil the role of both X and the window manager. (Yes, using libraries like wlroots or libmir, will make this not completely impossible, but it will still be non-trivial.) Plausibly, XFCE might join forces and use the same Wayland compositor as, say, LXQt or Mate.
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#roadmapplanned_fea...