This is the kind of initiative I’d prefer to see from X preservationists. Great job, I hope it succeeds. I prefer Wayland, but there’s still a place in the world for X; it just needs new dev teams to shoulder the burden.
I say let X11 die, bury it, and never let it rise again.
Then we can all focus on making just one display server as good as possible.
The distribution sprawl I largely see as a detriment to the ecosystem.
So, in theory, we can embrace a rather-minimal X11 implementation that can run the modern UI, including some desktop features missing in Wayland.
You cannot possibly use this as an argument in Wayland's favor. X11 sucked because it baked everything, including multiple outdated kitchen sinks, into a single Xorg monolith. Wayland sucks because it factors out everything, including really important features, into optional extensions, ensuring that anything more interesting than "draw pixels to a window" will always be different on every single compositor.
X11 was a single, pretty janky implementation. Wayland is the worst of both worlds -- it's cleaned up a little, but it's still kinda janky. In exchange for a little bit of cleanup, mainly around bitmap fonts, it's no longer a unified protocol.
And to top it off -- it kept the worst part of the X11 protocol, the XKB extension, but got rid of input handling entirely, which means that every platform needs to reach for platform specific code to implement reading from the mouse and keyboard.
Yay.
With Wayland, you don't even get compatibility with Gnome and KDE. You need conditional compilation to get mouse events if you port to FreeBSD Wayland.
For the medium term, if your goal is to reduce fragmentation, X11 is the portable target, even if you use Wayland.
Run gui apps in your container, local or remote.
Perfect
totally awesome! And once we are done with X11, lets put pulseaudio to the grave! We can all focus on having an audio stack that does realiably stream to many sinks!
And polkit... su and sudo should have been enough
That'll happen first, I think. The trick is that pipewire is actually a fully functional replacement, instead of trying to declare everything out of scope, so with only minor effort people can just switch and everything works.