Unless I'm misunderstanding the problem, Wayland is available on FreeBSD.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland

Not all *BSDs is FreeBSD :)

A NetBSD posted a blog stating NetBSD is having issues porting Wayland due to Linux specific items. OpenBSD stated something similar.

Both articles indicated it will be a very long time, if ever, to get Wayland fully working on their systems. I did see this presentation that describes some issues as of 2025.

https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/talks/BSDCan2025-jeff_frasca-way...

Some people hate wayland.

Those people can contribute to Xorg server further development.

The thing that kicked off this thread was hope that vim will continue to support X11. No need for continued X development really.

On the contrary, because you will want to have those drivers when the time comes to reinstall the system with more modern hardware.

Without X Server support at the OS level for the new hardware, doesn't really matter if vim supports it on its source code.

But surely not every BSD user?

Not every BSD user, but the one you're responding to is most likely in that camp.

But then there's no BSD/Linux dichotomy as they suggested.

What is “the Wayland UI,” anyway? Is this like that vim gui program that some Windows users use?

Usually vim runs I’m the terminal, so I don’t have any worries about losing support. But other people have other use-cases, of course…

Why would they do that? When I started learning VIM more than 20 years ago, one of the main reason was that it (or vi) was already present and installed in every possible Linux system.

There's always TECO! <Joking>