> X11 is in no way broken enough to justify such a huge change
Oh it absolutely is. The entire design of X11 is broken and a barrier to how applications & drivers actually work.
There's a reason that literally everyone else switched away from an X11-style model to a Wayland-style one. That is, MacOS, Windows & Android are all Wayland-style compositor designs. This was the major transition that Microsoft did from Windows XP to Windows Vista.
This is part of the reason that things like video playback in browsers on Linux is just awful. What browsers (or really any modern UI stack) want is just a system compositor that speaks buffers and transactions. Transactions are important to synchronize composition changes and content changes - for example, when you scroll a webpage with a video in it. It's better for power if the video is in a system composition layer, as then it can use a hardware overlay plane instead of being GPU composited (reduces power consumption). But then you need the browsers updated rendering of the scroll position to be synchronized with that composition update. This type of capability is standard on all major platforms at this point.
You can do this everywhere, except on X11. Possibly doable with extensions, but at that point your "extensions" are "completely change everything about the base X11 design & promises" as X11's base design & promises specifically don't provide anything like this.
X11's fundamental design is completely wrong & backwards. That's why a clean slate is necessary. Yes this migration is painful (see Windows Vista), but if it was actually pushed it would be a short term pain and the ecosystem would come out the other side healthier than it started (see Windows 7)
Oh it absolutely is. The entire design of X11 is broken and a barrier to how applications & drivers actually work.
There's a reason that literally everyone else switched away from an X11-style model to a Wayland-style one. That is, MacOS, Windows & Android are all Wayland-style compositor designs. This was the major transition that Microsoft did from Windows XP to Windows Vista.
This is part of the reason that things like video playback in browsers on Linux is just awful. What browsers (or really any modern UI stack) want is just a system compositor that speaks buffers and transactions. Transactions are important to synchronize composition changes and content changes - for example, when you scroll a webpage with a video in it. It's better for power if the video is in a system composition layer, as then it can use a hardware overlay plane instead of being GPU composited (reduces power consumption). But then you need the browsers updated rendering of the scroll position to be synchronized with that composition update. This type of capability is standard on all major platforms at this point.
You can do this everywhere, except on X11. Possibly doable with extensions, but at that point your "extensions" are "completely change everything about the base X11 design & promises" as X11's base design & promises specifically don't provide anything like this.
X11's fundamental design is completely wrong & backwards. That's why a clean slate is necessary. Yes this migration is painful (see Windows Vista), but if it was actually pushed it would be a short term pain and the ecosystem would come out the other side healthier than it started (see Windows 7)