> very narrow perspective, seemingly not realizing problems are much wider and not limited to one use case

Ironically, this is the complaint many of us have about the development of Wayland.

I'd say it's the result of the use cases being so broad, that some get more focus than others. There were obviously pain points that only gradually got better. But it doesn't mean Wayland isn't suitable for addressing those scopes. Someone has to do the work though rather than complain.

In the past there were some problems with protocols not being accepted fast enough, those issues were more organizational than technical. But that seems to have been finally resolved not so long ago and a bunch of really useful protocols were accepted recently.

I mean, I’m a Windows user so I have no dog in this fight, but it seems like the principal implants are that it’s slower, less responsive and less stable than the alternative. This seems like a primary use case. I’m not sure what the wider use cases you’re thinking of that justify the switch.

> it’s slower, less responsive and less stable

And the remote application/desktop story is terrible.

I won't consider it until remote is at least as good or better than Xorg, and I don't foresee that happening in my lifetime (literally,) so Wayland will remain a bugbear I'll continue ignoring. I don't know and can't imagine how a recently promulgated desktop GUI platform that doesn't have remote as top priority came to be, but they weren't interested in anything I care about.

I welcome Xlibre. It's not the first X fork, and the previous ones turned out great, as far as I'm concerned.

The remote application/desktop story works wonderfully with Wayland. Pipewire is the first time that screen sharing has Just Worked for me. GNOME's remote desktop seems to work fine as well, and reportedly so does KDE's.

You may wish to check the current status. (If you are not a GNOME fan, try KDE; if you are not a GNOME and KDE fan, I'd still suggest checking the quality of their features for the things you care about, to confirm what a Wayland-based environment is capable of; don't judge the quality of X11 by trying an equivalent of twm.)

> but it seems like the principal implants are that it’s slower, less responsive and less stable than the alternative

I think that's simply false. Wayland is a protocol. What's slow or fast is compositors implementation. And there are good ones that aren't slow / less responsive etc.

I used daily drive Wayland. It's fine; for most of what I do I'm happier with it than I am macos or windows. I frequently ran into screen tearing on X, something that I've not struggled with at all on Wayland.

I feel for people who are bitten by Wayland, but there's a really vocal negative group on here that I suspect are very much in the minority. Much like the switch from init to system, most people are fine with it.

It's understandable that people who aren't having problems aren't vocal; people don't usually go out of their way to say "everything's working fine, no issues".

Wayland works for the vast majority of people, and it's improving steadily. One of the main differences that leads people to complain is that in X, there wasn't any security between applications, and anyone could write a quick hack that makes things work for them (e.g. watch the keyboard for a key globally, or mirror the display remotely). In Wayland, there's no escape hatch: either the desktop environment needs to handle something, or you need to add a protocol for it. People experiment with new protocols all the time, but the Wayland project itself is (by design) slow and careful about adopting extensions.

It is understandable to wish for simpler times. But retrocomputing isn't a path forward here.