dbusfs

What you're saying is mostly what has happened already except the work has just been done outside the X server. The features in X that people don't use are already considered deprecated, and factoring the legacy parts off into a separate code module is essentially what XWayland is anyway. If you added all those things as X extensions, it would essentially be the same thing as Wayland, because clients that wouldn't use them would still be broken, and every graphical program and toolkit would still be need to be updated to use them. Your suggestions for dbus would work for some applications but would not really work for other things that a message bus handles like multicast, global message ordering, and resource accounting. Plus GNOME and KDE adopted dbus specifically so they could get away from having to pass around random sockets in folde

Ever try to use a dbus service from the shell? From any language that _doesn't_ rely on a binding to the C library? Therein lies your answer. It's like ioctl. The ioctl interface is an abomination precisely because it breaks the open/read/write/close interface. Ever try to use an ad hoc ioctl interface from any language other than C or C++? If all the world used the same programming language with the same control flow constructs then a strongly typed RPC interface would make a ton of sense. But it doesn't. The everything-is-a-file contract works well for the same reason that IP works well: because it pushes the complexity to the edges, and when the technology changes you don't need to upgrade every piece of middleware. Almost every modern language supports open, read, write, and close from day 1, giving you the necessary primitives to co