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> What other fragmentation was there?

No strong reference implementation. No protocol for access control and resource sharing. No centralized font rendering (which is a mistake. every app looks different now even when using the same library). No centralized drawing (which pushes things like multi dpi monitors + fractional scaling down to clients). And many other things. Essentially everything a typical application needs except pushing some pixels.

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No centralized XYZ isn't necessarily a bad thing and I don't think replicating X being everything and your sink with the same kind of design is a good idea either. But having a common way to do it (libinput, pipewire and etc.) surely helps to reduce fragmentation.

With "centralized" i really meant standardized. X11 has a standardized API that tells you how to implement window managers. Window managers themselves can be swapped, even at runtime without the need for swapping the whole display server or gui toolkit and are as such "decentralized". Similarly there should be a standardized interface to render fonts which every application can/should use and where the actual rendering backend can be swapped (ideally at runtime as well) because a lot of people have a vastly different opinion about how to render fonts (which comes down to taste in the end) but they want all their applications look the same.

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