On Abandoning the X Server

Article note: Early on I was pretty excited about Wayland, but it's become clear that they "solved" the problems with X being largely supplanted by a morass of largely-incompatible extensions only semi-standardized by community agreement by designing a protocol that declares all kinds of necessary-but-difficult features "out of scope" and consigns them to ... a morass of largely-incompatible extensions that aren't even semi-standardized by community agreement, which are now full of non-portable bodges. Unless and until there is a strong agreement among major players (right now, specifically between Gnome, KDE, and the wlroots libraries) around a single protocol for screen capture (for capture, for color pickers, for screen sharing...), a single protocol for the desktop inter-op stuff that used to be covered by ICCM, a single protocol for remoting, a single protocol for input interception and injection, etc. Wayland is somewhere between "not ready" and "actively a problem".