alt Hacker News> 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.
I think one of the intrinsic problems with relying on developers being paid by their employers is they can easily become personally disinvested from the thing they're maintaining; they get paid well, the day-to-day grind gets stale, they get interests and hobbies other than computing but keep working on the thing because it's their job. Eventually they find that just buying a Mac is an easier lifestyle at home, and gradually maintaining X transforms from something they do out of passion for the project into something which is just a job. So they look for ways to make their job easier, hit on the classic "instead of maintaining old thing it'll be more fun to make our own", and because they are now untethered from the needs of real users they only need to make sure the new thing supports the bare minimum to keep their employer happy. They no longer care how real users feel, any use case that isn't required in the checklists approved by management get deliberately abandoned. So we end up with Wayland lacking common sense desktop features in demand by users for years because it's simply not convienent for the developers who are now dispassionate 9-5ers.
I prefer to take my chances with enthusiasts keeping X working on shoestring budgets. Maybe a few more years of development of coding models will make ongoing maintenance easier going forward and I'll never have to switch. I'm willing to make that bet. If it turns out that in 5 years I am forced to switch, at least by then Wayland will be five years more mature, and maybe my cynicism will even be proven wrong by then and Wayland will be good by then (but I'm not holding my breath for that.) Anyway, I have nothing to lose by using X as long as humanly possible.
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Replace "X" with anything and this is why i generally try to avoid relying on open source projects where the majority of the development is driven by some company if there is an alternative, even if they're jankier (and often they are).
One example would be Free Pascal and Lazarus, while there is some commercial support, the overwhelming majority of the development is community-driven and ironically both have a much better history of preserving backwards compatibility than most open source projects backed by larger companies.
Of course exceptions exist for both situations, but as a general rule i find if some project makes a big deal about the company behind them (or even worse, there is a company with the same name as the project) then i tend to look for more community-driven alternatives.
Yes, but I think in the case of Wayland also management had other priorities, i.e. GUI for mobile and/or entertainment systems.
But this is all ok, I think the main problem is that somehow too many in Linux community did not see that the technical arguments for Wayland were not actually too convincing and that giving up decades of compatibility across UNIX systems and beyond is a mistake.