Yeah, what golinux said about X11 being outside the scope of Devuan's mission was pretty much what I assumed from the beginning, otherwise this thread wouldn't be in the Off-Topic section.

The thing about Devuan is... that as far as I know, it's designed to do exactly one thing. Provide a fork of Debian that does not include SystemD. And yes, that's a noble goal, and avoids too much scope creep. However, on the other side of the coin, that means that if the Debian project makes any other stupid decisions, like say dropping X11, then you're still stuck with negative consequences of those, because the mission of Devuan is solely to be Debian without systemd. And if the Debian project drops X11, that logically means Devuan will have to drop X11 as well, and therefore would mostly begin to appeal to people who only hated systemd because it goes against the Unix philosophy, perhaps rationalizing that Wayland is more modular and secure and thus follows the Unix philosophy better than Xorg, or something. But people who supported Devuan because they don't like broken workflows or loss of traditional ways of doing things more generally would unfortunately be out of luck if Debian breaks things for people in a way that technically has nothing to do with SystemD. After all, it is still possible to use Wayland without systemd, so Devuan would not have broken its promise to users if it dropped X11.

Those who want something like Debian but with X11 still included would, in theory, have to create their own "Dexian" or something, perhaps forking Debian again themselves to keep X11, taking inspiration and notes from Devuan, or perhaps even forking Devuan itself if they also want the new distro to lack SystemD. Still, I imagine this is a good place to get people talking about or thinking about such a goal, since I gather that a lot of people here are skeptical of the GNOME project, Freedesktop.org, and the Debian/Fedora direction and just aren't as much about the whole "tech go forward, deal with it" mentality that major distros have these days.

Still, I am kind of wondering if this goal may not even be achievable. It could be that this one is just too big and will touch too much stuff, and thus the "big wheels" who mostly want Linux to become a locked-down system focused on things like kiosk mode and touch UI will get their way on this one, because they're ripping too large a technology stack out from under people for anyone to maintain it on their own.

I mean, the problem with Xorg and Wayland is that the same people are maintaining both projects, which I would say is something of a conflict of interest. They choose to put Xorg in maintenance mode a long time ago, and created a timetable for replacing Xorg with Wayland. No one really resisted them on it or forked Xorg over the issue, which in their minds pretty much amounted to tacit acceptance of their plan. They played it out over enough years that resistance to Wayland largely became complacent and started thinking it would never happen, plus Wayland had time to mature enough that average users who never use anything but a web browser and a terminal on GNOME/KDE wouldn't notice the difference so much.

If you think about it, what they did is pretty much the textbook way of forcing unpopular changes over a long period of time used by big tech companies... announce them early, let people get angry and push back, set a really long phase-out period to the point that people forget you're doing it and maybe even think they've won for the moment, put the thing you're replacing into maintenance mode and fail to improve it significantly for a long time, and then cite the new features you added to the other thing as the reason why the old technology is being dropped, plus say that people had no excuse for complaining now because you already said you were doing it a decade ago, and it's not their fault you didn't take them seriously, etc. People aren't good at dealing with long-term problems that seem far away, and so all they have to do is extend the time horizon beyond most people's attention span, like say beyond 10 years in the future, and most of them will treat it like a thing that is never going to happen, being blindsided when it finally does.