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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Dead in the sense of development. ~~I thought this was obvious. But I explained it for you, here you go.~~ (Edit: I forgot to be nice. )
It's not dead there either, although I'd make the argument that X11 as a project is "mature" or "finalized", it doesn't really need hyperactive development like the tiktok children are used to.
(There are very good arguments that a new software stack was needed, but I'd expect the result to at least do something; ATM Wayland is little more than literally a "everyone else do my work for me" project)
I argue that X11 would have hyperactive development, if we did not have Wayland (or Mir, before it turned into a Wayland compositor). There are at least two major fields that do not work perfectly and cannot be changed by simple updates, it needs rewrite from ground up: a) advanced multi-monitor handling of different kind of monitors at the same time, b) security issues related to keyloggers, as apps are not isolated. Nobody want to touch the X11 code for more than simple maintenance, no one wants to rewrite major portions or add new features.
We just need Wayland, as you already noted there are very good arguments. A complete new base with modern code and people developing for modern times and hardware just makes sense. Think about it, do you really want to have X11 going forward the next decades? It's like holding to hard drives and saying its okay, there are no problems, and writing off SSDs.
Wayland was started by the X developers because they were sick and tired of hysterical raisins. Noone else volunteered to take over X, either, wayland devs are thus still stuck with maintaining XWayland themselves. I'm sure that at least a portion of the people shouting "but X just needs some work" at least had a look at the codebase, but then noped out of it -- and subsequently stopped whining about the switch to Wayland.
What's been a bit disappointing is DEs getting on the wayland train so late. A lot of the kinks could have been worked out way earlier if they had given their 2ct of feedback right from the start, instead of waiting 10 years to even start thinking about migrating.
That's the real issue. And its worse with Gnome, as Gnome doesn't want support "all of" Wayland and its protocols. That means Wayland will be broken on Gnome, despite Gnome being the most used DE (at the moment). People complain about the problems in Wayland, but not all problems are caused by Wayland itself.
However there were or are two big reasons I can think of why Wayland wasn't adopted early and for some may never: a) its much harder to be Wayland conform, because the window manager/DE has to do much more work, b) Wayland was just not ready before, as many important aspects were missing (in example some basic protocols, Nvidia) or broken. I don't blame them. For the record, I am not a Wayland chill, just talking about this, because there are many misconceptions (me included, I'm not perfect) and switched to Wayland just end of last year. Before that Wayland did just not work for me. I even switched from Qtile to KDE, because KDE has probably the best Wayland support (I hate manual window management).
Edit: I just remembered another reason why Wayland wasn't probably adopted early. Canonical/Ubuntu started a Wayland alternative called Mir (that was before Mir transformed into a Wayland compositor). And devs probably didn't want set on Wayland or Mir before knowing what will be around in the future.