TLDR: Wayland isn’t “old” because it’s technically hard. It’s old because of how Linux desktop development works

No single owner means no unified roadmap

Wayland is a protocol, not a product.
Every compositor (GNOME/Mutter, KDE/KWin, Sway, wlroots, etc.) implements it differently.

That equates to:

  • No central authority
  • No deadlines
  • No mandatory feature parity
  • No shared QA
  • No unified test suite
  • No “must support this for launch” list

Microsoft, by contrast, ships:

  • One compositor
  • One graphics stack
  • One set of APIs
  • One compatibility target
  • One engineering team with a boss who says “ship it by Q4”

Meme fuel: Wayland isn’t slow because it’s hard, it’s slow because 12 people argued about window borders for a decade.

Linux had to reinvent everything X11 used to do

Wayland deliberately shipped minimal, which meant everything X11 handled had to be rebuilt from scratch:

  • Screen sharing
  • Screen recording
  • Global hotkeys
  • Color management
  • HDR
  • Remote desktop
  • Window rules
  • Input methods
  • Accessibility APIs
  • Display server handoff
  • GPU handoff
  • Multi‑GPU
  • Fractional scaling
  • Window positioning
  • Server-side decorations
  • Clipboard management
  • Drag-and-drop
  • Middle-click paste
  • XWayland compatibility

Each of these became a multi‑year debate across multiple distros, DEs, and maintainers.

Microsoft would have:

  • Designed the protocol
  • Implemented the compositor
  • Implemented the APIs
  • Implemented the compatibility layer
  • Documented it
  • Shipped it
  • Required apps to support it

-All in one coordinated push.

Wayland’s timeline is shaped by:

  • Hobby maintainers
  • Burnout
  • Bikeshedding (people give disproportionate weight to trivial issues while neglecting important ones)
  • “Not my problem” attitudes
  • Fragmentation
  • No funding
  • No PMs
  • No QA department
  • No deadlines

Microsoft has:

  • Salaried engineers
  • Dedicated graphics teams
  • PMs
  • QA
  • Internal dogfooding (the practice of using one’s own products or services)
  • Enterprise requirements
  • Backwards compatibility mandates

This is why Windows can ship massive architectural changes (WDDM, DWM, WSLg, HDR pipeline, etc.) in a few years, not decades.

Microsoft would never ship a display server without feature parity

-Linux did!

Wayland shipped before it could replace X11 for:

  • streamers
  • multi-monitor users
  • color-critical workflows
  • remote workers
  • accessibility users
  • enterprise environments

Microsoft would not release a new display server until:

  • OBS works
  • Teams works
  • HDR works
  • Color profiles work
  • Accessibility works
  • Enterprise remote desktop works
  • GPU vendors certify drivers
  • All Windows apps run unmodified

That’s the difference between a product and a protocol, or communism vs capitalism.