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Comment by jasoneckert | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for Wayland - I agree with its direction and focus. However, Wayland will take a long time to reach the maturity that X.org has had for decades, including remote support. As a result, having both X.org and Wayland available on your disto is probably going to be the norm (and should be the norm) for a while. X.org is less "abandonware" and more "transitionware" in my opinion.

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> Wayland will take a long time to reach the maturity that X.org has had for decades

Xorg (the server) is from 2004 (16 years ago), the X Consortium was founded in 1988, and Wikipedia puts X11 itself at 1984 (36 years ago). Wayland's initial release was 2008 (12 years ago). Wayland is either 3/4ths the age of Xorg, or 1/3rd the age of X11 - bluntly, if they don't have their act together now, why should I expect them to ever get it together?

Developers willing/able to work on X11/Wayland plumbing are a (very) finite number. A single developer can have a large impact. With more of them switching their primary efforts to Wayland, the past few years have seen large improvements in the landscape, and this trend is bound to continue.

Granted, there are rough edges, and I wouldn't claim any Wayland compositor is as polished as an X11 one -- but we're not that far off, and for many people the benefits of running a Wayland session today outweigh the cons.

The thing is, that's also been true since at least 2015 - the claim is that Xorg is dead and all the devs who were working on it are on Wayland now and it'll be working any day now. And that's been the claim for at least the 5 years that I've been following it. And in fairness, they have made progress in that time - by the time Wayland is as old as Xorg, it might even reach feature parity!

To make the comparison closer to apples-to-apples, the Wayland analog to the Xorg server would be something like GNOME's mutter compositor, which had its first Wayland support out in 2013[1] -- 7 years ago. And the rate of progress has only sped up since then -- take a Wayland compositor from a year ago and compare it to the same one today, and things tend to be much more polished.

[1]: judging by https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland

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