“Wayback is an X11 compatibility layer that allows for running full X11-only desktop environments using Wayland. It is essentially an X11 server backed by Wayland, leveraging wlroots and Xwayland. Our goal is for Wayback to eventually be a completely drop-in replacement to the Xorg binary, thus reducing maintenance burden for distro maintainers.”
Oops… didn’t mean to delete my comment with the edit. It was imagining that this would have the main benefits of Wayland without having to give up X, or something like that, which sounded good to me.
(edit: lwn has a comment that explains it. Sounds pretty good for those of us who enjoy font and geometry rendering from the '80s.)
Yes. It has basically the same issue that any compatibility layer is going to have. It will either faithfully reproduce X11 so well it will bring all of the nonsense Wayland was meant to do a way with (everything not directly related to displaying graphics, like font and geometry rendering from the '80s, network transparency, insecure event handling) OR it will attempt to get a reasonable subset working for modern X apps and it won’t be compatible with dusty old binaries and X forwarding etc.
Right now it looks like a shim for Xwayland so it’s the first one, but as it matures we’ll see.