I'm not doing this, it's a thought experiment. I'm happy to stay with X for a long time if necessary.
But what you list is not enough, though. There are enough extra bits that goes well beyond what Wayland provides today, like ability to write a standalone wm without having to build a whole compositor, for example, that you'd end up with something quite substantially unlike Wayland if you went down that route and looked at which pieces of X11+extensions people are actually using. It'd be far less than full on legacy X11, but far more than just Wayland.
It doesn't matter if it's not X. Nobody but extreme purists would care if it's not exactly X. What will matter is if you lose capabilities.
E.g currently my preferred wm (bspwm) doesn't have a Wayland alternative, so a Wayland compositor isn't a viable option for me without changing my workflow. Sway might be nice, but it's different and I have no compelling reason to put in the effort to make a switch until running Xorg starts becoming problematic. One day, maybe I'll feel compelled to switch but it won't be soon.
Even so, Xorg will hang around for decades in the form of XWayland because of old X apps people still use (e.g. none of the terminals I have installed on my system except for gnome-terminal supports Wayland).
I still see no purpose to do that, with a lot of hacking it would be also possible to make XWayland work with window managers. But that also would be pretty pointless to do because those other parts of the X protocol are also bad and need to be replaced, you might as well just rewrite the window manager.
If I wanted to spend time redoing my configuration, maybe, but I have better things to spend my time on. So in however many years it takes before getting Xorg running starts taking more effort than switching. I'm not expecting that to happen anytime soon.
> It doesn't really work fine though, there are numerous really old bugs that never got fixed. Here's a sample:
It works fine for me. I gave my reason for why I won't consider switching to some Wayland compositor. None of the bugs you list affect me, so your suggestion I look at a Wayland compositor which would require me to spend time changing my entire config only to be left running XWayland anyway because the terminals I use are X11 based.
It would be a massive waste of my time for no benefit whatsoever.
And this is why X will stay around for a long time: There are lots of us with dependencies like this and no reasons to change things until things starts breaking.
> I don't understand, you were just talking about spending significantly more time rewriting the X server...
Read again. I have not once suggested I'm planning on rewriting an X server. I pointed out doing so would have been a better choice than starting over from scratch, and that the choice to start over from scratch is the reason people are still sticking with X.
I guess you can consider yourself lucky that you're not affected by those bugs? Things are ostensibly already broken and have been for quite some time, some of those bugs are over 15 years old. If you only care about bugs that affect you then it's not even worth having a discussion about this, you can't expect everyone to wait to make changes until it's personally convenient for you. And if that's not what you meant then the other stuff is still there if you change your mind and decide to switch.
"I pointed out doing so would have been a better choice than starting over from scratch, and that the choice to start over from scratch is the reason people are still sticking with X."
I would urge you to look into how much work it would take to actually fix those bugs and push out incompatible server/libraries/etc to people and then come back and see if you'd like to revise this statement. Because that is what we are looking at here. Remember what you are asking here is for every toolkit and program to do a "if x12 then dostuff elseif x11 then do otherstuff" and weigh that versus "if wayland then dostuff elseif x11 then do otherstuff".
There are always bugs in complex software, so sure. I can also consider myself lucky that I'm not forced into using a Wayland compositor as it'd force me to change my workflows in all kinds of ways.
> If you only care about bugs that affect you then it's not even worth having a discussion about this, you can't expect everyone to wait to make changes until it's personally convenient for you
I'm not expecting anything other than to keep using the software which works for me. I'm not the one arguing for people to change setups that works for us. Use what works for you. If that's Wayland that's your choice. For me it's not - it involves putting effort into something that doesn't give me amy benefits. Nobody is arguing for you to do anything or not anything.
> I would urge you to look into how much work it would take to actually fix those bugs and push out incompatible server/libraries/etc to people and then come back and see if you'd like to revise this statement.
No, I wouldn't like to revise that statement, because none of the bugs are relevant for an updated protocol unless you choose to keep the things that are broken, since the "worst case" is to throw away and start over the same way Wayland did.
> Remember what you are asking here is for every toolkit and program to do a "if x12 then dostuff elseif x11 then do otherstuff" and weigh that versus "if wayland then dostuff elseif x11 then do otherstuff".
And it's obvious that the number of if x12 then dostuff would have been far smaller and/or amortized over longer time because you'd only need them in cases where you actually introduced a breaking change that couldn't be fixed by using functionality that would keep working the same on both.
Most modern X11 apps already don't use most of the functionality of X that is worth deprecating, and for many of those who do the solution would be to change to a request that'd be worth keeping, not to add an if x12. E.g. as I mentioned there are a number of different ways of rendering text with X. The most popular terminals are split roughly in two broad groups: Those who use the old server side rendering, and those who use XRender (a couple of outliers use OpenGL). Most of the ones I've looked at use Xlib etc. directly rather than toolkits, though some of the font stuff in Xlib is wrapping the server side functionality in ways that could be retargeted to use Freetype.
If you remove the former, then ~half of the terminals would need to get updated to use the latter method or forced to use a proxy (ditching most of them isn't really an option - many of the most feature-complete ones use X directly, and all of the ones I have looked at have users who swear by them and will keep using them until there is a feature complete replacement; many of them are decades old and their users still don't agree there's one worth switching to) or client-side reimplementation of the font rendering. But assuming you were to retain the XRender glyph rendering you wouldn't need to special case for this hypothetical x12, just upgrade apps to use XRender, and you could yank out all the font support in the server. Moving to Wayland on the other hand requires all of them to change
To date most of the terminals I've looked at haven't been updated with Wayland support, and many probably never will, making XWayland and so most of Xorg still hang around as long as they have users and someone cares. Given how long many of them have survived, I'm guessing you'll have to wait for their user bases to literally die out.
The X12 approach would have allowed starting to actually deploy the improvements stepwise more than a decade ago. Or more. E.g. the XFIXES extension happened in 2003 and was the first real attempt at some somewhat potentially breaking changes hidden behind an extension flag rather than a version change (and didn't allow the server to actually ditch the old code). Nothing other than politics stopped a more drastic approach.
This notion that there were technical barriers stopping an iteration of X is pure fiction.
But what you list is not enough, though. There are enough extra bits that goes well beyond what Wayland provides today, like ability to write a standalone wm without having to build a whole compositor, for example, that you'd end up with something quite substantially unlike Wayland if you went down that route and looked at which pieces of X11+extensions people are actually using. It'd be far less than full on legacy X11, but far more than just Wayland.
It doesn't matter if it's not X. Nobody but extreme purists would care if it's not exactly X. What will matter is if you lose capabilities.
E.g currently my preferred wm (bspwm) doesn't have a Wayland alternative, so a Wayland compositor isn't a viable option for me without changing my workflow. Sway might be nice, but it's different and I have no compelling reason to put in the effort to make a switch until running Xorg starts becoming problematic. One day, maybe I'll feel compelled to switch but it won't be soon.
Even so, Xorg will hang around for decades in the form of XWayland because of old X apps people still use (e.g. none of the terminals I have installed on my system except for gnome-terminal supports Wayland).