[fa3556]

I feel like the ship has sailed for X11 or any fork of it, regardless of its technical merits (or the lack thereof). All the major DEs (KDE, Gnome, COSMIC) are either already wayland exclusive or soon will be. New DEs like niri, hyprland, sway, etc. are all wayland only from the start (some like niri dont even have xwayland support, instead pointing users to an external project, xwayland satellite, for running X11 apps).

And for almost all the somewhat famous traditional X11 DEs or tiling managers or wms, there is now a wayland compositor mimicking them. Cinnamon and XFCE both have advanced wayland sessions (a recent review of LMDE 7 by distrowatch praised Cinnamon's wayland session as even better than KDE's wayland). They might support X11 for now but it will be increasingly harder to maintain both especially if the majority of their users use the wayland session. This will lead to bit-rotting of the X11 code paths both here and upstream (GTK, mutter, etc).

There are obviously people unhappy with wayland because it has issues with accessibility or automation or other more niche use cases. As hard as it may be, I think the time would be better spent solving these issues in wayland instead. If it cant be solved upstream, downstream protocols like the wlr-protocols can be an option. In fact, even upstream, ext-namespace protocols only require 2 ACKs which shouldn't be too hard to get especially once more wayland compositors join upstream development.

This starts to impact the entire stack as toolkits, mesa drivers, etc. are increasingly developed with Wayland in mind and are simply better tested there. IMO wayback is probably a more fruitful investment than an x11 fork for those who want to run traditional X11 DEs.