Wayland starting to work

progman looks cool.

> nor will I ever switch to Wayland

One of the great things about Open Source is that you do not have to if you do not want. But you may have to do more and more of the work yourself. And you will probably be excuded from some new stuff. But that is your choice.

I agree, Wayback and Xwayland are likley to keep X11 window managers working for a very, very long time. And without much maintainance. As long as X11 stops evolving, Xwayland is mostly about security fixes and toolchain compatibility. And Wayback is the bare minimum Wayland compositor to run Xwayback. I doubt it will need much maintainance at all (once completed).

> a bunch of graphics developers got together and wanted to reinvent the wheel for themselves

That is not what happened. The Xorg developers wanted Xorg to evolve. At some point, they decided that X11 could not advance to where they wanted to take it without breaking it. So, they choose to feature freeze Xorg and start something new. The reason to start something new was yes to have a fresh base. But it was also to keep from breaking Xorg on everybody. So Xorg has kept working, and will keep working. Wayland has been "broken" but is now complete enough that most people would rather use it than Xorg.

> Wayland damaging the Linux ecosystem for no good reason

The conscensus is that Wayland is superior. That is the "good reason". And so most would disagree that Wayland is "damaging the Linux ecosystem". The opposite. But you do not have to agree. And, as above, Xorg has been left in a perfectly working state for you to use if you prefer it. That is part of the Wayland strategy. Stopping the evolution of Xorg is also part of the Wayland strategy. If you agree that X11 should be in feature-freeze, you can use either Wayback or Wayland. If you do not agree with that, there are other projects that share your vision (eg. Xlibre and Phoenix). Perhaps they will become popular but it is not looking likely.

> I understand XFCE's decision

Today, the message from XFCE is that they will have both xfwm4 (x11 window manager) and xfwl4 (Wayland compositor). The rest of XFCE will run on either. If X11 does stay feature frozen, keeping xfwm4 running forever should not be too hard. So, the XFCE team does not seem to be doing anything here to force users to use Wayland. Rather, they want to ensure that, as users and apps move to Wayland, users are able to continue choosing XFCE as their desktop.

If XFCE makes both choices available, I guess we will see which one users choose. If they choose Wayland (and I suspect they will), we will see that XFCE is not wasting ther precious funds after all. Why would people choose Wayland? Well, I suspect it will have many more features, better compatibility, and better performance in the future than X11 does. And XFCE will get to be a part of that.

But progman running on Wayback will still be a choice. People that see it as the best option may choose it.