Right, I think we can all mostly agree that the old state of things wasn't great/sustainable. The problem, IMHO, is that they went hard on the second-system syndrome and went way too far the other way. This allowed them to replace a massive messy codebase with a nice clean codebase that doesn't do the things people actually need from it.
Xorg put everything - way too many features - into one single display server (Xorg). Wayland put everything in the hands of the compositor, and then spawned an endless array of them (most of them implementing only a fraction of needed features).
X11 de jure and de facto required all those features to be present. In theory you could have an X server missing new features, but there was no way to get rid of really old features, and in practice you really needed all the new ones or apps would break. Wayland made essentially everything optional, to the point of fracturing the ecosystem.
Xorg was a monolithic reference implementation. Wayland ships a reference implementation in the form of weston, and it's so feature poor as to be useless.
X11 has, in practice, really poor security. (There were/are attempts to improve this, but it's not been terribly successful.) Wayland is really big on security. So much so that they refused to implement little things like screen shots and a11y features because they could be abused.
IMHO, with hindsight, they should have done this in 2 stages: First, do the backend refactoring to get the nice driver-facing parts (GBM, AIUI). Essentially, make rootful XWayland the only Xorg, but in a way that is completely invisible to users. (Or, put differently, ship https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback in 2010 instead of 2025.) Second, after you've done that and vastly simplified a huge chunk of code and made upkeep and refactoring easier, start working on X12. For the sake of argument, this can still be basically the same protocol as the wayland we actually got. However, don't actually ship that at first. Instead, go build/port an actual complete desktop environment to it, including all the features people actually want - clipboard, screen sharing, a11y and automation tools, remote desktop, etc. - and actually implement all the protocols needed for those. By all means make them optional add-ons to the core protocol, but make them up front. Also, I really recommend making one of those a window management protocol, so that 90% of window managers don't have to be a compositor, though some will. Then, after the thing is actually functional, start trying to get people to switch over. Don't start pushing people to adopt something half-baked and mess about for years on basic protocols that should have shipped day one (last I checked, in 2025 there are still 3 different incompatible wayland screenshot protocols). Make it an improvement, not a regression that only benefits you the Xorg developers.
> IMHO, with hindsight, they should have done this...
FWIW, it was also obvious to many people--certainly anyone who had ever been part of one of these big refactors before, whether as the platform or the user--that this is how it should have been done when they started... they just didn't care, and then they spent a decade both directly and indirectly (by condoning the behavior) bullying people who were concerned about the process and insisting that people who even still today have perfectly working systems were/are committing some kind of cardinal sin by not embracing the one true path of Wayland, despite regressions. It is extremely difficult to find any sympathy for the people involved :/.
Xorg put everything - way too many features - into one single display server (Xorg). Wayland put everything in the hands of the compositor, and then spawned an endless array of them (most of them implementing only a fraction of needed features).
X11 de jure and de facto required all those features to be present. In theory you could have an X server missing new features, but there was no way to get rid of really old features, and in practice you really needed all the new ones or apps would break. Wayland made essentially everything optional, to the point of fracturing the ecosystem.
Xorg was a monolithic reference implementation. Wayland ships a reference implementation in the form of weston, and it's so feature poor as to be useless.
X11 has, in practice, really poor security. (There were/are attempts to improve this, but it's not been terribly successful.) Wayland is really big on security. So much so that they refused to implement little things like screen shots and a11y features because they could be abused.
IMHO, with hindsight, they should have done this in 2 stages: First, do the backend refactoring to get the nice driver-facing parts (GBM, AIUI). Essentially, make rootful XWayland the only Xorg, but in a way that is completely invisible to users. (Or, put differently, ship https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback in 2010 instead of 2025.) Second, after you've done that and vastly simplified a huge chunk of code and made upkeep and refactoring easier, start working on X12. For the sake of argument, this can still be basically the same protocol as the wayland we actually got. However, don't actually ship that at first. Instead, go build/port an actual complete desktop environment to it, including all the features people actually want - clipboard, screen sharing, a11y and automation tools, remote desktop, etc. - and actually implement all the protocols needed for those. By all means make them optional add-ons to the core protocol, but make them up front. Also, I really recommend making one of those a window management protocol, so that 90% of window managers don't have to be a compositor, though some will. Then, after the thing is actually functional, start trying to get people to switch over. Don't start pushing people to adopt something half-baked and mess about for years on basic protocols that should have shipped day one (last I checked, in 2025 there are still 3 different incompatible wayland screenshot protocols). Make it an improvement, not a regression that only benefits you the Xorg developers.