That would be pretty amazing if Xorg ever rendered in a way that was even equal to other platforms (mutter, Windows, android, MacOS, ...) given how crazy the separation of concerns in X is and how many silly boundary crossings need to be made to process events and render them.
It would have to rely on compositor and driver bugs in those other platforms.
That's funny, because for me, it's exactly the opposite. I use Gnome on Wayland/Mutter and it works great - I've never had a linux desktop that had such great UI rendering. Gnome on X doesn't work and is buggy - it's riddled with graphical glitches that other platforms (even smartphones and tablets) don't suffer from. How can that be considered to "work"?
Nobody is intentionally going to make X worse but everyone will make the kernel, graphics drivers, desktop environments, and other components better but potentially different in ways that no one will be updating X to match. X and it’s associated tech like DRI will bitrot. And of course existing bugs will go unaddressed.
I think this is a very emotional issue because people are being told that an important tool will be taken away from them, but I also think that it's important to think about being reasonable.
X, architecturally, is a dumpster fire. None of the ideas that were reified in it's design, types, or behaviour - not forcing rasters down unix pipes nor building widgets with X objects nor rendering networked fonts nor the general concept of immediate-mode widget rendering - are actually used today in modern X apps and have been mitigated-away with hacks and jury-rigs. But the design and the types and the protocol persists and no one wants to work on this nonsense in their free time. Unpaid programmers have voted with their commmits and Xorg has been orphaned. It's a dirty job and for the longest time only paid programmers have maintained X. And the last company to pay programmers to work on this stuff canvassed their customers and decided that the work didn't need to be done anymore.
Everyone using X today has been free-riding on RHEL customers for years and Redhat has decided not to burden them with this anymore. And nobody else is volunteering to pay for this.
I don't think entitled developers is the right term here. As an Xorg user, how much did you pay to use Xorg?
...which was a peculiar discussion because I don't think anyone mentioned that just about everyone runs X today with some combination of DRI2 or DRI3, which involves plenty of latency, boundary-crossing, and buffer-copying.
This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless.
Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg, there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make the move.
That depends a lot on how difficult it is to keep Xorg working with modern distros. You might get forced into Wayland when your favourite distro and all acceptable alternatives don’t want to put the work into integrating and patching an aging Xorg.
Whether it’s with a carrot or a stick, you’re going to Wayland sooner or later.
Exactly. What we’re really seeing here is technical debt from the fact that we have so many different desktop environments. Much of the cost of having Gnome and KDE was hidden by the fact that a lot of the job of putting pixels on the screen and handling keyboard and mouse events was done (very badly) by X in one way or another.
Now the compositor/screen manager isn’t doing that anymore because it never should have and it was a terrible division or responsibility in the first place. But we have devs pushing forward on multiple different fronts with different DEs and development is painfully slow.
It would have to rely on compositor and driver bugs in those other platforms.