X11 and its ecosystem of applications isn't abandoned by Wayland, because you can run an X11 server on Wayland. By all means, debate the merits of Wayland itself, but don't lean on inaccuracies and conspiracy theories.
> debate the merits
Wayland has no merits. That is kind of the problem. It is just a reimplementation of stuff that worked.
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.
My understanding is that Wayland was started by a few core developers of Xorg who just couldn't stand maintaining Xorg anymore.
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.
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.
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.
https://blog.mecheye.net/2014/04/xwayland/
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html
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.