As much as the "Wayland is now ready since it's the default on big distros" meme goes, it's not really ready if you're having issues with it.

Ready means if everything is flawless to MacOS/Windows levels, where you never have to think about display server compatibility, and that's where X11 is still king despite the performance shortcomings. At least it always just works™ and compatibility beats performance most of the days.

That feels like a high bar for FOSS (maybe for any software...), but given how long Wayland has been getting worked on, you'd hope it's at least usable for most (but not digital painters, apparently).

Keep in mind Wayland has been worked on since 2008 when I was still in school. I think some young HN readers haven't even been born yet.

I could excuse it if it had been 4 years old or so, but it's old enough already it can drink and smoke in Europe.

Wayland is now way older than Xorg was when they decided that it needed re-inventing.

Fun fact, GTA Vice City is now further away (22 years) from its 2002 launch date than it was from its story setting of 1986 (16 years).

If that game were to be launched today and feature a setting in the same time delta, it would be set in 2008 when movies like The Dark Knight or the first Iron Man launched.

How time flies.

I remember the nineties when 30 years ago was the 60s. now 30 years ago is my flipping childhood.

So when you were a child, a 1969 Mustang was a "clasic car", but now an equivalent classic car would be a fourth gen Honda Civic that your local weed dealer drives.

thank goodness I don't know what any of that means, I was never into cars!

Maybe more a Camero IROC-Z?

Wayland was first released in 2008, so it's 15 years old.

Xorg was a fork of XFree86, which was released in 1991. So that codebase was 17 years old when Wayland was first released. I don't think the date of the fork is what's relevant here.

I could also argue that you should be comparing the Wayland protocol (2008) vs the X11 protocol (1987), or even older versions of X (1984).