My window manager won't work, my hotkey daemon won't work, my screenshot tool won't work, any X11 program that draws to the root window won't work. Xwayland is obviously not a working solution to fix the ecosystem problem. Who is inaccurate now?
> debate the merits
Wayland has no merits. That is kind of the problem. It is just a reimplementation of stuff that worked.
Also, even the limited X11 support which there currently is under Wayland will probably go the way of the dodo because it involves about the same amount of code as supporting X11 natively. For example, it requires every Wayland compositor to be a X window manager with all the complexity that implies, plus running a full hardware-accelerated X server and the OpenGL driver support for that. I can't imagine the desktop environments and distros who are so keen on dropping legacy features like X and support for 32-bit apps will keep all that code around for long.
Once the integrated X support is gone you can't just replace it with a standalone X server of the sort that's available on OSes like Windows and Mac OS X either - by design, the standard Wayland API doesn't provide the functionality required to run X (or Windows) apps. In particular, it provides no way to set or get the absolute position of top-level windows, which apps on those platforms need to support things like menus. In a few years time, I can easily see modern Linux becoming the only current desktop OS that cannot run X apps.
Xwayland doesn't need a hardware specific DDX driver, because firstly, many of the features can be implemented by forwarding to the Wayland server, and secondly, the drawing operations (which don't exist in Wayland) have been implemented hardware independently, based on OpenGL, in the GLAMOR backend.
If hardware vendors don't have to care about it, then Xwayland should not create a huge maintenance burden and thus I'm pretty confident it will be available until 2030; enterprise distros likely won't be able to remove it earlier anyway.
X doesn't need a hardware specific DDX driver either when running on hardware supported by Wayland+Xwayland. The GLAMOR backend works just as well for a standalone X server, and it can just use the same libraries and APIs as Wayland does for the rest of the stuff. (There's not really any kind of hardware abstraction layer in Wayland itself.) The main reason why people use the hardware specific X drivers still is because they're more mature and robust than the Wayland stuff.
Maintaining Xwayland basically means maintaining all of Xorg except the hardware-specific drivers. And Red Hat doesn't want to maintain that code base anymore. Therefore, Xwayland will soon be abandoned, then deprecated, then removed entirely.
The wayland project exposes what marvelous piece of software X11 really is since Wayland is still not able to compete, otherwise the whole Linux community would use it already.
I respect the intention and efforts of the Wayland community to make things better. However, I wished the community would have focused on making X11 better (easier to maintain with modularity etc.) instead of following the mainstream which is focused on eye candy and other sensual features to attract customers.
The unfortunate developments of KDE3/4, Gnome2/3 and Win7/8 exposed that boring usable functionality is much more important than exciting sensual functionality.
It is, including the author of this post. Unlike other controversial things like systemd or pulseaudio, Wayland was started by major Xorg contributors. I've watched some of their talks and can see why they went down this route.
I've tired Wayland a few times and whenever I do, I give it an honest shot for a few weeks, but tend to run into issues (Sway being pretty buggy or oddities with old X apps or Steam, etc.) I've heard Sway has gotten a lot better and I should really try it out again; probably the next time I setup a laptop.
I do wonder what plans FreeBSD and OpenBSD have for the future. Currently they main their own Xorg trees, but I wonder if we'll ever see Wayland implemented on other platforms.
I used Sway during the 0.14 cycle and ran into some issues e.g. with pointer warping in X-based games, so I decided to wait until 1.x. I just switched to Sway again, with 1.1.2 AFAIR, and mostly everything is working smoothly for me this time around, including Minecraft. :)
Things that don't work for me:
- mirroring (i.e. two displays showing the same windows at once), but AFAIK this is being worked on
- KDE Connect (not Sway's fault, but not having this working really hurts sometimes and might just make me go back to Plasma)
Windows 8 was a major improvement saddled with an untested UI that someone was using to make their political mark. The internals of Windows 8 and Windows 10 are a major, major step forward from 7.
> debate the merits
Wayland has no merits. That is kind of the problem. It is just a reimplementation of stuff that worked.