Ya, I am not going to defend how Wayland has been rolled out.

I think competing implementations is a good thing. But it would have been nice if the reference implementation was usable early on. Nobody ever used Weston. If you did, you came away thinking Wayland did not work. A reference implementation that worked and that others could build real compositors from would have been welcome.

Instead, the big desktops like GNOME and KDE created their own compositors but not in a way that others could really reuse.

It was not until Sway (not even a great compositor) created wlroots that things got better. There are now many wlroots based compositors. And Smithay on Rust is great. The main driver for Smithay has been COSMIC but Niri used it to create a compositor quickly. And now there are Louvre, mir, SWC, aquamarine (used for Hyprland), and other compositor toolkits like the one XFCE is creating.

Both KDE and GNOME support most of the same standards now, and wlroots and smithay are not far behind. Bringing back the browser analogy, these are like blink, gecko, and WebKit—engines that other project can use to create a browser without having to do all the hard work of creating a browser.

In the end, building a new compositor on one of these foundations is going to resemble what it took to build a window manager for X11. And your new compositor will be pretty standards compliant because your engine is.

In Wayland, there is the core display server but also the extension protocols implemented as XDG desktop portal and the like. You can mix and match the core toolkit and portals. Using Niri as an example again, it uses Smithay for the compositor but combines that with the XDG stuff from GNOME. Projects like wlroots give you both sides (eg. there is a xdg-desktop-portal-wlr).

In a couple of years, the top toolkits will be mature and the compositors built with them will support a complete and common set of standards. So, we will be a good place.

But the Wayland architecture will mean that some new and better compositor library will be able to emerge and new and better compositors can be built from it. And that will drive all the others to improve. We will not have just the one universal but ancient implementation like we did with X11.

Back to the browser analogy, it is great that Chromium (blink) and Firefox based browsers exist and that we have so many browsers to choose from. There are very few web engines but they are mature and standards compliant. The engines compete with each other which drives them to be better and all the browsers benefit. But it is also great the Ladybird can come around and compete directly with an entirely new engine from scratch. This is what Wayland will look like in a couple of years.