Except that there are people actually relying on remote GUI apps right now, that aren't web apps and won't be. Seriously.
This is one of the reasons why Wayland is, after 4+ years, still not seriously deployed anywhere. It's easy to sit back and pontificate about how things "should" be. It's a much more involved proposition to actually getting around to breaking people's software. No one wants to pull the trigger with Wayland.
And, I suspect, that's part of the reason Canonical went with Mir (and for the record: I completely agree that the technical justification there is bunk). Wayland is forever-evolving and never quite there. Shuttleworth wants something to ship. If your requirement is to pull a trigger, you at least want to know that you own the gun.
Is that good or bad for Ubuntu or the community? I don't know and won't try to guess. But I will say that at least some of the ire directed at Ubuntu might be better directed at the Freedesktop folks for not getting something ready years earlier.
Basically, if X sucked so much, why wasn't there more urgency directed at replacing it? Crying now because someone else got there first seems counterproductive.
I don't think X is going away any time soon, you your GUI apps are safe. I've observed that a number of things that used to be GUI apps for me have become web apps though, sometimes to dedicated controllers running embedded web servers but web apps none the less. I would be interested to hear about apps that are both "remote GUI apps" and there is no path to them becoming web apps. (not 'in the cloud' but driven by an application framework that replaces
"local X client executable" + "local X server" + "remote server"
or
"local X server" + "remote X client" + "remote server"
There just seems to be a wealth of tools to support that.
That said, I am not sure that people using X11 is why Wayland hasn't really been present. There really is a bunch of things that all have to be true and getting all of those things true has always been difficult, and its even more difficult in open source.
My background is from Sun, where we had this cool set of applications and stuff called "SunTools" which were awesome but not widgety. Dave Rosenthal was a big proponent of X11 and after a few years it looked like it might be useful and Sun put a lot of effort around aligning the kernel the user land tools, the libraries, etc. We all worked for the same company and it was still a horribly arduous task. Because of that experience, my feeling is that Wayland's progress has been par for the course for something which changes as much of the underlying stuff as it does. There is a lot of change in there.
We also may disagree on Mir, I think Canonical is backing Mir because they "own" it, and got tired of waiting for negotiations to settle out before moving forward. I don't know of course, I don't have any inside knowledge, but I do think the rate of implementation Shuttleworth has pushed for is antithetical to something that needs as many players in the game as Wayland does and still leave it open to consensus decision making. I been building a Weston based application off and on the PandaBoard for a couple of years and have followed events around there a bit. A lot of strong, correct, and incompatible opinions makes for slow going. Part of the challenge is everyone brings their own requirements which makes their opinion more applicable. It looked to me like Canonical said "We're going to align all decisions on this to the point 'makes Unity Next work well'"
My guess, is that X has survived as long as it has because the pain of replacing it is great. However I predict that once either Mir or Wayland hit the tipping point people will abandon X rapidly and leave it in the dustbin of history. Only time will tell.
This is one of the reasons why Wayland is, after 4+ years, still not seriously deployed anywhere. It's easy to sit back and pontificate about how things "should" be. It's a much more involved proposition to actually getting around to breaking people's software. No one wants to pull the trigger with Wayland.
And, I suspect, that's part of the reason Canonical went with Mir (and for the record: I completely agree that the technical justification there is bunk). Wayland is forever-evolving and never quite there. Shuttleworth wants something to ship. If your requirement is to pull a trigger, you at least want to know that you own the gun.
Is that good or bad for Ubuntu or the community? I don't know and won't try to guess. But I will say that at least some of the ire directed at Ubuntu might be better directed at the Freedesktop folks for not getting something ready years earlier.
Basically, if X sucked so much, why wasn't there more urgency directed at replacing it? Crying now because someone else got there first seems counterproductive.