I ' m pretty sure that besides the fact that the X protocol is network transparent , all of those were tacked on after many , many years of it existing . X 11 actually long has not been ' network transparent ', let ' s call it ' network clear enough '. Transparent means the client does not care at all , it does care , but you can stil do forwarding . And no , the other features were there from the start . It was always possible in X to capture and reroute the output of clients as well as programmatic fake input to clients . They don ' t exist in the wayland ecosystem because nobody bothered to develop them yet . No , they don ' t exist by design . Because they are considered a ' security risk '. Security and power are opposite ideals . The most secure computer is not turned on at all , which is kind of useless , so where do you decide the optimum lies ? Chromium OS worded it very well Google Chrome OS devices must be Secure users must be protected from attackers . This protection should reasonably extend to inexperienced or naive users . Open developers must be able to install their own builds of a Chromiumbased OS , or another operating system e . g . , Ubuntu . Developers should not be significantly impaired from using the full capabilities of the device . These two requirements are somewhat at odds . Locking down a device to protect users makes it less useful for developers . Openings for developers to run modified software easily can also be exploited by attackers . Chromium OS has solved this with the ' developer mode ' where you gain all that power but your protections are gone and all safety rails protecting you have been disabled . X 11 essentially always runs in developer mode and Wayland always runs in Phone OS mode . The debate as said centres around how needed that power really is and how large the userbase is that needs it . But this is absolutely not an issue of It will come , we just haven ' t done it yet . it ' s an issue of We purposefully omit it because it ' s dangerous and insecure and we don ' t think enough people need it to warrant its inclusion