alt Hacker NewsWayland made writing WMs needlessly hard, and the benefits of Wayland were frankly not real - most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later. All the Wayland rewrite got us was a situation where Wayland is both bleeding-edge and obsolete simultaneously. Say what you like about X11, but by the time people unironically pushed for mass Wayland adoption, X11 was stable and boringly so.
The future of WMs is, IMO, Arcan - https://arcan-fe.com/ - but that's an ambitious project and I don't blame the main developer for deliberately going out of his way to avoid advertising it before it's ready. In the meanwhile, Wayland and X11 both more-or-less work with the occasional major pain in the ass.
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I think the problem is that people wanting to build that and being in position to (being paid for by their employer), are fed up with X11.
It learned no lessons from X11. It made most things harder to write and pushed more things that really every WM needs and doesn't care much to implement differently to WMs making them harder.
For example, stuff like "WM need to manage raw inputs, so they can have more power over them" is cute on paper but in reality most of them don't want to because there is no benefit to reinventing that part. Sure, that part in X11 could be better, maybe it should have better interface for WMs to configure common options in common way without getting into input-driver-specific options, but that just required rework of the idea, not throwing it into the bin and replacing with near entirely worse framework that wastes everyone time.
> "most of the reasons given in 2011 were patched in to X11 later"
This definitely doesn't match my memory, and I was there :) Most of the good reasons remain unavailable in X11 to this day.
There definitely were some attempts to advance X11 that post-date Wayland, most notably the proposals by Keith Packard, but they never got much traction.
Thanks for linking Arcan, looks interesting.
After a quick scan, Arcan seems to be pushing a microkernel approach, with some clients providing display server capabilities and others talking to them via shared memory. This will have the same problem as all other microkernels - nice for research, but the extra completely outweights the marginal benefits over a monolithic thing that generally has a smaller API surface to maintain.
First time I've heard of Arcan. Sounds intriguing.
IMO, if you have to rewrite a display server implementation then you're already proving all the protocol advocates right.
Let me know when X11 handles fractional scaling across mixed dpi and refresh rate monitors, with HDR and VRR. To me, who has finally been able to drop Windows for gaming in the last 3 months, the benefits of wayland are very real.