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I don't think so; Xorg would have (and arguably has in fact) broken in a completely different way than Wayland. Xorg sucks in that 1. its underlying model of display hardware doesn't really map to how modern computers/GPUs work, and 2. its entire protocol has 40 years of cruft. Wayland sucks in that it declared everything beyond drawing pixels an optional extension, and then took 16 years to implement enough extensions to actually compete with X on features (hence my "half-baked" dig). Or more succinctly, X sucks on the backend, Wayland sucks on the frontend. In your analogy, X is the 1987 Hyundai Excel, and Wayland was born a motoped - fast, fuel efficient, and useless as a car replacement. What I firmly believe the X devs should have done (with 16 years of hindsight) is put all their initial effort into replacing the graphics backend while keeping Xorg for users - basically, make rootful XWayland the only Xorg server on Linux - in order to quickly burn a lot of the parts that were painful to maintain with minimal impact to users. Then, if the rest of X really needed to go, they should have written all the protocols needed to implement at least GNOME and KDE before releasing anything, so we didn't spend years on stupid "we have 3 different incompatible screenshot APIs" games. Instead, they shipped a minimum "viable" product and got upset when users didn't want to switch.



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