The X Window System was developed at MIT in 1984, and made a bold architectural choice: separate the display (where pixels appear) from the application (where computation happens), allowing GUIs to run transparently over a network. This was visionary in 1984 and has been an albatross since roughly 1995, when most people stopped caring about remote display and started caring about compositing, GPU acceleration, and latency. X11’s network transparency introduced layers of abstraction that made writing a fast, modern desktop environment heroically difficult. Wayland was announced as the replacement in 2008, has been “almost ready” for most of the time since, and has achieved genuine adoption only in the last few years. X.Org, meanwhile, has been in maintenance mode so long that its maintainers have started referring to it in the past tense, slightly prematurely.
