While Xorg itself (which isn't a monolith, BTW) provides more than the bare minimum, so does the Linux kernel - or even the Unix/BSD kernels of old - yet programs that did follow to the Unix philosophy were built on top of them.

In X11/Xorg's case, a common example would be environments built off different window managers, panels, launchers, etc. In theory nothing prevents Wayland to have something similar but in practice 17 years after its initial release, there isn't anything like that (or at least nothing that people do use).

At least in my mind, the Unix philosophy isn't some sort of dogma, just something to try and strive for and a base (like X11) that enables others to do that doesn't go against it from the perspective of the system as a whole.

This one bothers me too.

Systemd and Xorg are very similar in many ways. I do not know how you hate Systemd and love Xorg unless your real problem is just change.

And, while I like Wayland, I think that liking the Wayland architecture should have you disliking Systemd. But that is just me.

I'm in the same boat. Systemd is an unpricipled mess and ships some quite shoddy replacements for pre-existing components. Wayland is super clean, it just takes for-everrr to add the features that users (and developers) expect. It could seriously have been done over 10 years ago not by heroic development effort, but by not being pathologically obstructive about features.

The two projects are complete opposites except in one way, they replace older stuff.

> but they tend to also hate Wayland which does and moves away from a clunky monolith (Xorg)

It's been 17 years and Wayland has yet to reach feature parity with X11/Xorg. There is doubt that it ever will.

Regardless of what you think the Unix "philosophy" is, actual features matter.

But Wayland is a protocol suite, you're comparing it against Xorg, an implementation that shipped 16 years after X was created.