For someone who has not used Gnome in 14+ years you sure seem to know a lot about it…
X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it. No one should be surprised.
And still, there are SEVERAL Long Term Support distros out there that will support X11 for the coming years. Please stop pretending that stuff will start breaking. It will not.
I find that my projects hosted on codeberg are heavily deranked or entirely missing on the top mainstream search engines. My github projects are almost always top 3.
So if it is a library someone might gind useful it has to go in gh. My personal toys can stay on cb.
There is a dangerously large population of devs and managers that look at themselves, unironically, as the gigachads pumping out ui “upgrades”
Many of these fail to realize how disruptive it is. UI change is like API breakage for the brain.
I have lost track of how many times I’ve tried to help an elderly family member with an app after some pointless, trivial, ui change. Only ending with them entirely giving up on using the app after the “upgrade” because the cognitive overhead of the change is beyond the skill that can fairly be expected for them 💔
X11 is “complete” in the sense that we have followed it to the end of the road. X11 has a series of well documented fundamental problems that does not make it suitable for a modern OS. I will not belabor them here (except to note that security in particulat in X11, is exceptionally weak for modern standars). These issues are unfixable because they are built into core assumptions and behaviours of all legacy apps.
At some point there has to be a switch. There simply is not manpower to maintain 2 separate windowing systems. I am sure we would all want there to be an army of devs working on these things on maintain the 2 stacks. But that is not the timeline we live in. The number of devs working on these things is very low.
Was it too early? I don’t know. There will never be 1-1 feature parity with 30 years of legacy apps. I honestly believe that fixing things like a11y are gonna be much more tenable with only a single windowing system.