The supposed motivation behind Wayland is a simpler implementation, yes. It's much more assuming of a Linuxy system, too, being developed mostly by Red Hat people. One of the main active Xorg developers being a member of Oracle's Solaris team should show where things are going, really.
Whether it actively achieves simplicity in practice is another question. Over time, more and more things have been moved out of Xorg, e.g. font handling (fontconfig, freetype), rendering (Mesa, cairo), display management (libdrm), UI toolkits (GTK, Qt, SDL), rendering many parts of the X stack redundant. Wayland mainly only deals with the transfer of input, window management, and graphics buffers between the server (compositor/window manager) and clients (windows).
Various NetBSD developers are interested in Wayland, but I've been doing most of the direct work so far (that isn't prerequisite yaks). I have a semi-usable set of GTK3 applications working and stable on intel via Wayland. They work but aren't stable on radeon. I hope to have most of the client-side wayland bits fully integrated and enabled by default (alongside X) in pkgsrc in time for 2019Q3.
The truth is that all that's missing for functioning Wayland-ish compositing on NetBSD is polish. All the bits are there and just need more work before it's usable as an X replacement.
What doesn't work?
- Compositors that target Linux (I'm working on our own stuff, though).
- Keyboard layouts (it currently defaults to US) - requires translation of wscons keycodes
- HiDPI support - probably requires some missing compositor bits.
- Multi monitor support - maybe requires some changes to our DRM stack
- Fast rendering - optimizations optimizations optimizations...
- Non-DRM rendering (dumb framebuffers) - needed for some of the legacy and unaccelerated machines NetBSD supports.
- Cursor themes - I suspect a bug.
- Qt5 - Haven't tried getting it to work yet, because it's quite a beast and I'm not very familiar with C++.
My intention is to push it forward to a usable state. Whether I manage is another question. X will be around for another decade or so, at least. It's worth noting that NetBSD also contains another, ancienter X server, specifically to support 68K machines!
