Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”
It’s meant as a replacement, but not necessarily a backwards compatible one. Not everything X11 can do will be possible in Wayland, and not everything Wayland can do will be possible in X11.
In most cases, Wayland doesn’t break anything, it just has a different API to accomplish the same task.
Yes, I know. Which is why it “breaks everything”.