>>106504282
I've begun to question if Cinnamon is truly up to the task of being a desktop worthy of recommendation among the general populace. Technology is moving fast, and other major desktop environments have been innovating a lot since the birth of Cinnamon. One big elephant in the room is Wayland support, which is still in an experimental state. The recent developments in the Linux scene to drop X11 support have put this issue in the spotlight. If there isn't solid Wayland support soon, Cinnamon users will be left in the dirt when apps outright stop working on X11 platforms. Now, there's reason to believe that it's just a matter of time for this one issue to be addressed, but that still leaves a lot of other things on the table. GNOME's latest release has introduced HDR support, which is yet another feature needed for parity with other major platforms. How long will Cinnamon users have to wait for that to become accessible?
Even if patience is key to such concerns, there's still a more fundamental question about the desktop's future. Cinnamon inherits most of its components from GNOME, but many of these came all the way back from 2011 when GNOME 3 launched. To this day, there are still many quirks that are remnants of this timeline. For instance, Cinnamon is still limited to having only four concurrent keyboard layouts. This is an artifact of the old X11-centric backend that GNOME ditched as early as 2012. This exemplifies the drift that naturally occurs with forked software, and it's only going to get worse at the current velocity.
