I think Wayland, and the modern desktop in general too, has forgot about a few good ideas that the original X system had. I will miss them once Wayland has taken over:<p>- A unified way to change applications settings. All old X apps used to read the X resources database (xrdb): you could set a global color scheme, fonts, window geometry and what not, all in one place using a simple but powerful text format.<p>- The simplicity of the window managers, hotkey daemons and other X clients. You can implement a functional wm in a few hundred lines of C[1] because the X server takes care of most of the stuff. In comparison a compositor has much more work to do and it's difficult to implement one, unless using a big library like wl_roots.<p>- A base graphics API based on drawing primitives like the original X, SVG or Cairo, rather than just bitmaps. This would make writing a simple application without importing huge frameworks feasible again. Also sending the drawing calls over the network would probably be less bandwidth intensive.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/vardy/aphelia" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vardy/aphelia</a>