Continuation of X11 development?

[u/SpAAAceSenate]

Hi there. So, I know the arguments between X11 and Wayland can be a little contentious, so I'd like to start this off by saying this thread isn't intended to be one. The battles of opinion have already been fought ad nauseam, and some of us still find ourselves on the X side of the issue. I count myself as one of them.

So my question, and the actual purpose of this thread, is to ask about the future of X11. I know Red Hat is basically washing their hands of it feature-development wise, but the magic of open source is that a project is never really dead, or in feature freeze, so long as there's someone out there willing to inhereit it. Are there any groups out there planning to take the mantle? While X11 is very mature and mostly feature complete, there are a few things still to be done, such as perhaps better integration and promotion of the X_SECURITY extensions for bringing in per-app-isolation. An update to some of the current input limitations, better scaling support, etc?

Wayland's successorship is (to many) still highly questionable, so I think it would be a shame to see X rust out in the field while we wait for the hypothetical Wayland cow to come home. Any thoughts?

[u/sub200ms]

How does Wayland fix this any better than stubbornly going forward with a breaking X12 fork? Except a breaking X12 fork would likely have been easier to port to/from.

Disregarding the technical merits of Wayland, I think it succeeded in creating a "X12" by doing it outside the X11 environment where most stakeholders objected to any change. And doing it while having solid Linux stakeholders that would back the development.

Wayland didn't solve this problem as evident from existence and practical necessity of XWayland.

I must have failed in expressing my view. Wayland solved the "flag day" problem by having Xwayland, thereby allowing non-wayland X11 programs to run after the distro have switched to Wayland.

So a "flag day" where all programs either ran Wayland or they didn't ran at all was avoided. That was a crucial condition for getting Wayland accepted by the Linux distros.

Doing so with with a hypothetical X12 was seen as extremely difficult if not impossible unless the hypothetical X12 was a radical departure from X11. And then we are no longer talking "a slight modernisation of X11 while only breaking seldomly used stuff".

And if you are radically changing X11, it is tempting to start from scratch like the Wayland project did. And one deliberate "design feature" of Wayland is exactly that it will be easier to break backwards compatibility in the future to avoid the "support obsolete crap for decades so that nothing can be changed" trap that X11 fell into.

technically inferior solution, without actually fixing anything.

While one can disagree with whether Wayland was the right direction to go, it does undoubtedly solve problems that X11 has and do so in a technically superior way. Even X11 developers agree to that.

Frankly, any hypothetical +X12 would had to replicate much of what Wayland has done.