alt Hacker NewsIn my view, this project itself shows some of the reasons why Wayland is the right path forward.
On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you.
On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man project expecting to deliver a dev release in just a few months (mid-2026 is 4 months from now).
But it is not just that we have addressed the Wayland objection. This project was able to evaluate alternatives and decide the smithay is the best fit both for features and language choice. As time goes on, we will see more implementations that will compete with each other on quality and features. This will drive the entire ecosystem forward. That is how Open Source is supposed to work.
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The other key element with Wayland is that the kernel does a ton of the work for you. There s GEM buffer management and DMA-BUF to manage and move around video & regular memory, there's kernel mode setting, there's incredibly good mesa drivers.
X didn't have any of that to build from. It basically was a second kernel, was the OS that dealt with the video card atop the OS actual. It talked to the PCI device & did everything.
Part of the glory of Wayland is that we have fantastic really good OS abstractions & drivers. When we go to make a display server, we start at such a different level now. Trying to layer X's abstractions atop is messy & ugly & painful, because it mostly inhibits devs from being able to use the hardware in neat efficient clean direct modern ways. You have to write an X extension that coexists with a patchwork of other extensions that slots into the X way, that can figure out how to leverage the hardware. With Wayland, most compositors just use the kernel objects. There's much less intermediary, much less cruft, much less wild indirection & accretion to cut a path for.
And as you beautifully state, competing libraries can decide what abstractions & techniques work for them. There's an ecosystem of ideas, a flux to optimize hone & improve, on a variety of different dimensions. The Bazaar free to find its way vs the one giant ancient Cathedral. It's just so so so good we're finally not all trapped inside.
Tl;dr: Wayland has a much higher level that it can start from. And trying to use gpu's & hardware well in X was a nightmare because X has a sea of abstractions - extensions that you had to target & develop around, making development in X a worst of both worlds low level but having to cope with a so many high level constructs you had to navigate through.
Because Wayland only does essential low-level stuff such as display and graphics it forced people to start coming up with a common Linux desktop (programming) interface out of nowhere to basically glue everything together and make programs at least interoperate.
Such an effort to rethink Linux desktop alone could've been a major project on its own but as having something was necessitated by Wayland all of it has become hurried and lacking control. Anything reminiscent of a bigger and more comprehensive project is in initial stages at best. If Wayland has been coming on for about ten years now I'll give it another ten years until we have some kind of established, consistent desktop API for Linux again.
X11 did offer some very basic features for a desktop environment so that programs using different toolkits could work together, and enough hooks you could implement stuff in window managers etc. Yet there was nothing like the more complete interfaces of the desktops of other operating systems that tied everything together in a central, consistent way. So, Linux desktop interface was certainly in need for a rewrite but the way it's happening is just disheartening.