> There are X extensions for shared memory buffers. Client isolation for X could also have been implemented as some kind of extension. With both of those you could solve some issues but it still wouldn't be the same as redesigning the core protocol.

So why redesign the core protocol if the selling points of Wayland can be had without going through all that hassle? What are the true selling points of transitioning to Wayland, if they can be had for far less work?

> Yes this might cause some fragmentation but realistically, has X really helped there? The huge proliferation of clones and forks of various X window managers that are incompatible in various ways is another kind of fragmentation.

There was only ever one dominant X server implementation for the past 30 years (XFree86, then X.org), so yes, I'd say it helped a lot to keep the video/input multiplexing system out of the hands of window manager and desktop environment developers. This ensured that your graphical programs would always work, regardless of what desktop environment or window manager you used, because they all spoke the same protocol and relied on the same reference implementation. A proliferation of Wayland compositors would take all of that away.

The basic idea of Wayland is that it is a simplification and streamlining of a display server protocol. The work of designing that core protocol is already done and doesn't need to be done again, the original developer likely did it because they found it interesting or useful to work on in some way.

The situation isn't that much better in X, the window manager and desktop environment can break clients in other subtle ways that have nothing to do with the X server. There's no guarantee that graphical programs would always work if your setup does something strange.

> The basic idea of Wayland is that it is a simplification and streamlining of a display server protocol. The work of designing that core protocol is already done and doesn't need to be done again, the original developer likely did it because they found it interesting or useful to work on in some way.

The mere existence of Wayland does not justify removing X11. I'm not trying to say that the X.org and fd.o developers shouldn't do as they please; I'm saying that I'll keep X11 until I see a compelling reason to drop it for Wayland.

> The situation isn't that much better in X, the window manager and desktop environment can break clients in other subtle ways that have nothing to do with the X server. There's no guarantee that graphical programs would always work if your setup does something strange.

I'll have to take your word for it, since I have literally never seen this happen (been using Linux as my daily driver since 2006 and have used dozens of WMs and all the major DEs). I agree that something inconsequential like the visual appearance of widgets or some such might not be consistent with the overall WM or DE theme, but X11 programs in general can run on a bare X server.

The only kind of non-trivial breakage I could imagine happening is accessibility features malfunctioning due to the absence of a particular DE, but I don't know to what extent this is the DE's fault, the program's fault, or the toolkit's fault.