> You only get one chance to make a good first impression

There plenty of chances to make good non-first impressions though.

I used to check periodically whether Wayland works better than X for me, until it does one day, and I switched.

Not everybody hold on to the shadow of a bad first impression. It’s unfair when subject to another human being, and irrational when subject to a product.

Really? I can’t help but notice that nobody is describing X as if it hasn’t improved since XFree86 in the 90s so perhaps it is possible for technical professionals to update their understanding?

You seem to be seeing a confrontational message where I didn't mean one. Yes I'm sure you could find some old posts complaining about X that would illustrate the same phenomenon. My point is pretty much exactly that. Fast forward the next 5-10 years and we might all be on Wayland but they blew their first impression and that's delaying adoption.

It sounded like a but of a misdirected excuse: if someone is still complaining about Wayland now based on an initial experience half a decade ago, wouldn’t the first step be getting up to speed with the current state? When I read that I was reminded of how many Linux users had issues with things like mode lines back in the day, and that was a non-issue only a few years later.

The problem is 20 years ago you had to use XFree86 if you wanted graphical output in Linux, there was no other choice, so you had to put up with it no matter the craziness.

Now X.org works fine for the majority of users, so for them (/raises hand) it is very hard to see the value proposition of switching to Wayland, especially if prior attempts were less than successful.

The fact that X11 development has stalled might be a plus for those that just want a stable system, are used to the limitations and don't need new features.

We will migrate eventually, likely at next distro upgrade, but there is no hurry.

You also didn't have much choice; XFree86 is what everyone used and it more or less the only realistic option.

Also doesn't help some people have been rather aggressively banging the Wayland drum for a long time now in a way that quite a few people find rather unpleasant. About half a year ago someone told me I "need" to switch to Wayland because programs will drop X11 support "any time now", all with a sense of glee. A quick search on https://hn.algolia.com with "Wayland by:username" showed they have been telling people that for about 7 or 8 years. Clearly that hasn't happened, so... And when they started banging this Wayland drum so aggressively there really WERE actual problems. Textbook "toxic fanboy" stuff. At some point people start filtering this sort of stuff out.

The first time I really looked in to Wayland was when "I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit" article took off, which starts by comparing "anti-Wayland activism" (something which doesn't really exist as an organised force) with "anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers", dismisses anything that disagrees as "lies", and is generally just a stupid rant with a number of fairly obvious factual inaccuracies. To say this rather put me off from Wayland would be an understatement.

I'm not holding you responsible for any of that of course, nor am I saying this is representative of people interested in Wayland as a whole, but at the same time ... I do think Wayland has burned a lot of goodwill with stuff like that, and that people voted that stupid insulting conspiratorial rant to the frontpage did no one any favours – it's not just a single person who wrote that article, it's the hundreds of people who voted on it, and some of whom defended it.

> XFree86 is what everyone used and it more or less the only realistic option.

Not really; in the 90s, there were many X servers, each implementing a different set of extensions. Not just for other Unices, even for Linux, you could purchase a proprietary ones.

For XFree86, it was a monolith, that you had to compile for a specific chipset. Distributions shipped with many binaries, each intended for a specific graphic card and the installer symlinked the right one for you. It was only later, that XFree86 became modular and everyone converged on it.

That's what I mean with "more or less", and they were all more or less compatible and was mostly a "Vim vs. Emacs" type situation, not a "plz rewrite your entire stack"-type situation. That's really the key difference here.

I wonder if you asked people their feelings about 1) Wayland, and 2) systemd, whether or not sentiment would be highly correlated. My first impression of both was when I had a problem.

Add BTRFS to that list; I hear it's gotten better, but I lost 2 root filesystems to the thing and the impression rather stuck.