I very much agree with what you wrote. I'll just add a comment:
> Overall, wayland is a good clean slate, it’s been in development a long time. X11 has major warts and they are hard to clear out.
This may seem like it's irrelevant for the user. It isn't. Lots of things us users want are much easier and more attractive for developers to add to the clean slate design that is Wayland.
For example: When I switched, an unexpected bonus I experienced was that my touchpad's behavior got orders of magnitude better. So I googled around a bit, and it turns out that almost all touchpad improvements just happen to occur on Wayland because the people who are interested in that aren't interested in wading through the X swamp in order to implement their stuff. (I mean, have you looked at the X code? Oh dear, oh dear, it's a daunting thing!)
> This may seem like it's irrelevant for the user. It isn't. Lots of things us users want are much easier and more attractive for developers to add to the clean slate design that is Wayland.
This is something I don't understand about Wayland. How is it possible that something that is supposed to be much easier and more attractive for developers after TEN+ years of development still has so many issues ?
On the other hand, a bunch of X11 issues were just listed, and X has existed three times as long. Some issues are architectural and thus probably not solvable, some are just persistent annoyances that must be difficult to fix and likely will not get fixed because X11 has so little active development anymore. X has enough issues that a good portion of the community said, "we've got to fix this". And frankly, I've used software from multi-billion dollar corporations that gives me more trouble in a day than Wayland does in a month.
The protocol had been in development for that long, most compositors for a few years, and clients change their implementation up to their own schedule.
I see it as a “failing” of the bazaar way of development, linux can’t just say we now use this API. So there is an inherent not enough user on the new API to bother porting, and due to not enough user it is not as streamlined/stable, and you have a vicious circle. But I have to say the issues with wayland are heavily overstated, and I think it is out of this cycle, and is getting quite a bit of steam.
> Overall, wayland is a good clean slate, it’s been in development a long time. X11 has major warts and they are hard to clear out.
This may seem like it's irrelevant for the user. It isn't. Lots of things us users want are much easier and more attractive for developers to add to the clean slate design that is Wayland.
For example: When I switched, an unexpected bonus I experienced was that my touchpad's behavior got orders of magnitude better. So I googled around a bit, and it turns out that almost all touchpad improvements just happen to occur on Wayland because the people who are interested in that aren't interested in wading through the X swamp in order to implement their stuff. (I mean, have you looked at the X code? Oh dear, oh dear, it's a daunting thing!)