What I’m talking about is something different. My post is not about building an implementation myself, but about advocating for a direction. The idea is not to keep Xorg’s implementation or its internal abstraction layer, but to preserve the design philosophy of X itself — the distributed, protocol‑based, client/server model that enables remote graphics, composability, and implementation diversity.
A key advantage of following the X philosophy is that we don’t need to change GPU drivers, because modern Linux already has Mesa/KMS/DRM as the real driver layer. A new protocol and a lightweight, strictly‑scoped abstraction layer could sit above that, combining X’s distributed design with modern techniques from Mesa, without inheriting X11’s legacy complexity. This layer would not implement any concrete rendering or window system logic — only provide the minimal interface needed for distributed graphics and multiple implementations to coexist.
This avoids the “Android-style” direction where the graphics stack becomes local-only and loses distributed capabilities. Instead, it keeps the door open for a healthier, multi‑implementation ecosystem.
(English is not my native language, so this reply is translated with AI.)
This mostly sounds like Wayland to me. Anyway, build it.
I’m not advocating copying Wayland or rejecting a greenfield implementation. My point was simply that a protocol‑first approach deserves to be part of the discussion, especially for use cases that Wayland intentionally doesn’t target.
It turns out it's actually much better to just write in your own words and in your own voice, even if it's full of mistakes. We want to hear you, not a generated or filtered version of you.
Other explanations here in case helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...