X was 1984. X11 was 1987. Twelve years later in 1999, it worked just fine.

to give you an idea of 1999, I was running Quake 3 on Linux with official Nvidia Riva TNT support and X11.

X11 also ran fine in 1995. Granted, I think fvwm2 was probably state of the art for window managers at the time. From '95 to almost '97 or '98 I stuck pretty much in 80x25 or 80x40 text console. Not because X11 didn't work, but more so because xterm really sucked and the only apps you would use in X11 anyway were Netscape, Gimp or xv (image viewer). Gtk+ also did not exist, so everything was ugly Motif or Tcl/Tk.

Oh, and... there was always talk of replacing X11. Even in the '90s. People have been talking about replacing X11 nearly as long as X11 has been around, sadly.

1995 the state of the art WM was probably GWM which was fully programmable in a Lisp dialect. You could even draw your window decorations in Lisp using various primitives. It was never widely used though.

Even before that. I remember installing X11 on PCs in 1995. And it worked much earlier than that on UNIX workstations.

Sorry, I meant X. Wrote X11 out of habit. But X11 is a version of X, so I still think the relevant date is 1984 and in 1996 I was still writing modelines in my X conf file... and at least with Wayland you don't have to worry about a misconfiguration frying your monitor.

Wayland (and X11, and any other modern display system) will absolutely fry non-multisync monitors. Those were common in 1996.

Hardware has just improved enough that we don't need to care.

This isn't wayland vs X11.

X11 is terrible for other reasons, but let's not give wayland credit for hardware improvement.

As another comment notes this is more due to EDID and multisync monitors: hardware and protocol improvements in consumer electronics.

X was actually okay in 1996 on the proprietary Unixes with their proprietary graphics card and proprietary monitors. (At least on HPUX, Solaris, and Irix). Linux and the *BSDs had some catching up to do primarily in hardware support and autoconfiguration. But they did so quite rapidly.

Then again, was there even an alternative back then?

I think, based on the responses to your comment, that your comment is quite wrong. It seems X11 was completely functional at the time, which Wayland is definitely not at this time.

It’s not that hard to understand... Wayland is a protocol. If you have a few badly implemented browsers, is the web protocol bad?

Also, it is questionable at best to state that Wayland compositors doesn’t work. Gnome is quite stable and with pipewire everything just works. Sway is similarly a stable software.

In practice I do not care about the difference between wayland compositors and the wayland protocol. When I say “wayland sucks” what I mean is that every time I have tried any “wayland” desktop or WM, it has not worked for my workflow and has tons of bugs and missing features. I do not care whether this is because of the protocol or some other reason.

Random example: in Sway, Chrome and all Electron apps have blurry text on displays with scaling other than 1.0. Every time I try “wayland” (or whatever term you would prefer I use), there is some show stopping bug like this.

I feel like the conversations here usually go like this, with people just talking past each other:

A: “X11 is going away, time to switch to Wayland!”

B: “Okay, but last time I tried it, it didn’t work for me because <list of reasons>”.

A: “No no no, you don’t understand, that’s not Wayland’s fault, it’s a compositor issue.”

B: “Well, whatever the issue is, I’d like to keep using X.”

A: “But X is going away! It’s deprecated!”

> Random example: in Sway, Chrome and all Electron apps have blurry text on displays with scaling other than 1.0.

That’s literally because of X. Both of them run by default in XWayland, but chrome do have wayland support already (but has to be enabled), and electron also have since being built on chrome, but most versions out there are not built with that version I believe.

Also, noone says you SHOULD change. Feel free to use whatever you want. But saying wayland suck, when you didn’t even use goddamn wayland for evaluating it just “sucks”...

> That’s literally because of X

I don’t care — that was the whole point of my comment.

> Also, noone says you SHOULD change

Yes they do! People are saying all the time that X is deprecated and going away, and we need to switch to Wayland.

If other people want to use Wayland, it of course doesn’t bother me; I just hope it never becomes the standard and pushes out X, which works fine for me.

> Yes they do! People are saying all the time that X is deprecated and going away, and we need to switch to Wayland.

You can continue to run on eg. Linux 3.* if you so wish. And X is a stable software, it will continue to work reliably in the foreseeable future, even without active maintenance.

> It’s not that hard to understand... Wayland is a protocol. If you have a few badly implemented browsers, is the web protocol bad?

Did you read the comment I was responding too? It had already conflated the two. However, in the spirit of not being petty, I ignored the conflation and decided to address the real issue, that implementations of Wayland are not stable after 12 years, while X was actually stable after about 8.