> x is not actively maintained any longer. And wayland is >10years old.

I do receive Xorg updates from time to time on Arch, so I don't think it is unmaintained. It don't get any new features as far as I can tell, but for some this is a good thing. I don't like a display server that moves fast and breaks my system.

I rephrased the sentence. Security issues are fixed to the extent possible. But no new features will be added.

sounds good to me. This means the project is complete and we can begin to use it confidently.

Software is never complete. And even if it was the world around it moves on.

Will you never want HDR, colorspace support, and whichever feature is next? Even if that is somehow the case, I would think most people aren't software archivists.

There's some basic software that can be seen as tools and sometimes are even called as such. They are like a hammer and while it might be cool for some people to have a hammer that has WiFi, Internet and a small 4k screen included (so that you can watch netflix), many don't like that additional functionality and all they really need and want is a hammer.

> Will you never want HDR

For the record, I do actually work on the analysis and processing of hdr and multi- and hyper-spectral images. Using 8 bit rgb colors on my monitor is still alright, and I'm very happy with X (and I would probably still be happy with wayland, I really don't care).

This is at least somewhat circular logic. The arrival of Wayland is a big contributor to killing people's motivation for further development of X. Had Wayland not arrived, somebody might have well been inclined to solve problems in X instead.

Yes, yes, people who actually worked on X didn't like it already. But the total amount of work of fixing the issues via Wayland is surely larger than the amount of work fixing them via X would have been.

Going with Wayland wasn't a good engineering decision, but it was probably a good social decision.

It has not “arrived”. It has been invented by the same people that were doing X.

The use of "arrived" was precisely to abstract from this sub-discussion.

But since you raised it: your description is quite misleading. One person proposed Wayland. Some others (who happened to be already unhappy with X) thought it was a good idea. Most of them were or are involved in Xorg directly or indirectly. But the development of Wayland was not some upfront decision by X developers.

Doesn't change my point: Wayland is not some truth revealed that had been bestowed upon the developers who then seen the truth and went away from X. The set of people working on Xorg and Wayland was overlapping so much, that work on Wayland stole (took away, diverted, see thesaurus if my choice of words grates on you) cognitive resources needed to maintain Xorg.

And then they just stated a fact "oh, see, no one wants to maintain Xorg" as if they didn't know. This atmosphere of faux surprise is what I didn't like at the time. Also the unwillingness to publish a step-by-step guide of "how to make a release" with simultaneous unwillingness to make releases. I bet if there appeared an actor actually willing to take up maintainership of Xorg, that actor would be actively smeared, gatekept and bottlenecked to death by the current Xorg gatekeepers because Xorg dying and their crippled darling taking over is their dream.

I think we're largely in agreement. I just got the impression that you treated X developers as a homogenous group who all think that what happened was the best thing. That's not the case.

If X isn't actively developed anymore, it's because wayland has sucked up the remaining developer resources I guess. Apart from a very brief episode in late 90's I'm not into X development so I'm not in a position to have an opinion, but I'm having trouble with "the way forward" argument, considering we're already long past peak-desktop. I'm more concerned with the precious few desktop apps we have (towards which there were nearly no additions in the past decade) and loss of niche apps due to additional Wayland porting, integration, QA efforts put on developers of said apps, which realistically might spell the end for many extant desktop apps.

Using Wayland old apps can still be run using snap/flatpak.

It’s open source though, there is nothing to stop others picking it up and developing it if that’s what they want to do.