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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Second System Syndrome otherwise know as 'throwing the baby out with the bath water'.
X11 is old, extraordinarily old for software. As such, the problems it solves are not really problems anymore.
Rather than gradually evolving X11, into say X12, the whole thing got dumped on the trash pile and a brand new entirely incompatible thing called Wayland was started from scratch.
Replacing software with literally hundreds (if not thousands) of person-years of development devoted to it over it's lifetime is hard. Which meant that Wayland had an unfeasibly steep hill to climb, as such it's early days were tumultuous and it got a bit of a bad rap.
There is far more (qualitative and quantitative) history than will fit into this ~~margin~~ comment.
Well the other side of that is managing software with hundreds (if not thousands) of person-years of development over it's lifetime is also hard. There is a sunken cost fallacy with X11, and X11 was constantly extended to be what people needed it to be rather than the best design for the problems arising.
Having said that, I'm not sure Wayland is the ideal solution. X11 doesn't get in the way of solutions to problems, while Wayland really does. We needed a new and modern display server, but the Wayland project has decided to make that quite restricted - I personally think the security model is too far in the other direction from X11.