As a fvwm user, if Linux forces Wayland on me, I guess my 30 year use of Linux may be coming to an end. Oh well.
>It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow
well you just framed it perfectly; it's still forced on the end-user regardless of whether or not you want to call it 'linux' or 'the community that controls and steers linux" .
I don't know about you, but corporate dictates always leave a bad taste in my mouth.
The narrative that everything is corporate and greed is, imo, a deep deep dis-service. Incredible things are happening on the edge, and there's nothing else on the planet remotely resembling the conjunctive discollaboration here. Folks have incredible leverage from existing open source works, & add their own sparkle, time and time again. (Nearly never does this box us in.)
For sure there are big projects too, with huge corporate influence and millions of users.
But it is a deeply rotten proposition to me to try selling some corrupt world case, that this land here is just as rotten and poisoned as the application/apppliance-ized rest of world. That there's coersion. There's some being left behind the pack, some, but so little. "Linux" is still the best freest most augment-intelligemce computing out there by a light year, and it's trends are healthy.
(Wayland in fact has improved & strengthened that stance, freed us from a nasty monolith that everyone had to use, and given us actual freedom of implementation. Wayland is part of the liberation, the addition of choice & liberty. It's wild to me that people seek those old chains.)
I already mentioned quite an array of projects that I find inspiring. I can't say I know of anything in particular coming from BSD land. ZFS has adherents for sure but there doesn't seem like there's any innovation or creation or downstream net new coming out of that.
The Linux software environment is more broadly controlled by corporations, but that goes for every single mainstream operating system.
Pulseaudio was forced on me because Firefox and a few others need it.
PAM was forced on me because some applications needing it, I believe that was due to kde.
Until v15, slackware had no need for pam or pulseaudio
Now many of us are waiting until systemd is forced on us :(
That said, you cannot run Wayland apps this way, it is purely for X11 only. If applications/rendering toolkits remove X11 support, you're out of luck. But Wayback may actually be a reason for some of them to keep maintaining X11 backends a bit longer, anyway.
1. Applications or toolkits only supporting Wayland. An example of this is Waydroid, though thankfully that's the only example I'm currently aware of.
2. Desktop Environments only supporting Wayland. Examples now include GNOME and KDE.
3. Drivers only supporting Wayland. I think this may be the case of some "exotic" systems; I believe there are some postmarketos systems that don't have graphics with anything else. Thankfully, the existence of Wayback means this is probably a non-concern.