I have a couple unused phones lying around doing nothing. One is cheap "GoClever" phone i bought a few years ago and had it die or something some years ago (it is most likely fixable, but my mother had a phone she didn't want anymore due to upgrading and i got hers instead) and another is the ill-fated ZTE Open with Firefox OS which i bought the instant it was available (through ebay because nobody local would have it available).
What i'd really love to do is to replace the entire OS from the ZTE Open one with a barebones Linux, and X server (no Wayland) and a few custom apps to use for music playback, note taking, etc. It was on my mind since i actually got my hands on it and saw how an awful idea was to have an OS that is built around "web applications" (i already knew it, i just hoped it wouldn't be too bad and wanted it for the novelty of having a phone with the Firefox logo :-P). The hardware is theoretically more powerful than the PC i had back when i played Quake 2 in full software rendering mode, yet it was barely usable due to everything being slow (i've actually lost calls because the UI was frozen).
I see from the hardware list that some related devices seem to be supported so at some point i'd like to try doing that. It is more for a "here is how to actually make use of hardware resources without sucking" personal statement than something i really need (my 1st gen iPod Touch still works fine after all), so it might take a while for me to bother trying :-P.
May I know why that is? By all accounts, Wayland is more adapted to embedded devices, with a cleaner architecture. I don't think that you need features such as xdraw, printer and gpu drivers, input handling or a lot of what isn't display related baked into the compositor.
I tkink that PostmarketOS could actually fit your goal quite well (you can run a variety of desktop environments on it, with Xorg o'er Wayland, including lightweight ones such as i3). But of course, the project is still in its infancy, although the community is pretty welcoming, and would probably be happy to help you get started ;)
I can understand why people are hesitant with Wayland, because they look at things like systemd (which is still a usability nightmare, although it does make packaging much easier).
I recently ran Wayland/Weston on my home theater PC running Void Linux. For the most part it semi-worked. I have few native wayland apps, so almost everything ran through xwayland. Steam was weird; as the mouse was offset about 300px to the right and down. I'd have to hover away from stuff to click on it. Kodi would often Flicker (my HTPC just uses Intel ingratiated graphics). Most of the Games (both Steam and Humble) worked fine though.
Weston, the reference implementation, just isn't that great. I ended up going back to X11/Gnome3 after getting sick of the graphics glitches and bugs, and forgot how terrible gnome is now (I've used i3 on my desktop for years).
I might go the Wayland route with Sway (i3 clone for Wayland) on my dev box, but Weston was honestly still too buggy for prime time on my media pc. I do agree though, X11 is old and awful and Wayland is a big improvement over X11. But I do run X11 apps remotely over SSH (something the wayland people assume no one does) and when asked about it, they kind just hand wave everything away like someone just needs to write a plug-in and it will work.
postmarketOS might be the big push to really get Wayland mainstream. I'm really impressed by postmarketOS and hope it will be what Linux was for the x86/PC in the mobile world. You could install Linux on everything back in the 90s/2000s. ARM is a cluster fuck of random shit connected to random pins that are different on every SoC. This is a real major step to true alternative mobile OSes.
Two reasons, one is that i don't like Wayland - partially because its simpler architecture comes from pushing the complexity to the clients, but also because i see its design as very short sighted (e.g. the wl_shell API provides a function to create a popup and grab the mouse cursor at the same time and that is the only way to create popups in the core API because the designers only thought about menus, comboboxes and the like and only defined functionality for that - in contrast X just gives you generic functionality).
The other reason is that i am writing an X toolkit and so i already have a lot of X code i can use (as i wrote, "custom apps"). For the uses i have in mind Wayland could probably also work, but i'd need to write a lot of extra code that i'd rather avoid writing.
PostmarketOS does indeed look like what i have in mind, but as i said, i'd rather have pure Xorg without Wayland (it should be doable since, AFAIK, both should use the same graphics stack). It is something i'll try looking into at some point.
What i'd really love to do is to replace the entire OS from the ZTE Open one with a barebones Linux, and X server (no Wayland) and a few custom apps to use for music playback, note taking, etc. It was on my mind since i actually got my hands on it and saw how an awful idea was to have an OS that is built around "web applications" (i already knew it, i just hoped it wouldn't be too bad and wanted it for the novelty of having a phone with the Firefox logo :-P). The hardware is theoretically more powerful than the PC i had back when i played Quake 2 in full software rendering mode, yet it was barely usable due to everything being slow (i've actually lost calls because the UI was frozen).
I see from the hardware list that some related devices seem to be supported so at some point i'd like to try doing that. It is more for a "here is how to actually make use of hardware resources without sucking" personal statement than something i really need (my 1st gen iPod Touch still works fine after all), so it might take a while for me to bother trying :-P.