Could something like 12to11 be used as an alternative to porting to Wayland, or as a stopgap measure to support Wayland only apps?

[pugly-tech]

https://github.com/probonopd/12to11
12to11 is a tool for running Wayland applications on an X server, so that they can run directly in say Cinnamon operating in X11 mode.

As it is wayland will be a very slow project as the wayland developers basically shoved all of the hard work onto everyone else, who is forced to reinvent the wheel every time and often have slightly incompatible implementations. Even now every wayland implementation relies on xwayland to run apps that were never ported to wayland and may never be. Ultimately X11 is supported by all drivers and programs at this time, and it will be a very slow process for critical systems like system drivers to drop support, if they ever do. Even if Ubuntu Gnome drops support for X11 sessions it still relies on X11 for xwayland, and most Ubuntu spins (Such as Ubuntu Cinnamon) will rely on X11 for a long time so it won't be removed from the repository. Plus X has been forked by Xlibre(for the third time, previous forks were Xfree86 and Xorg) who are committed to improving X11 and making it better over time.

So in the end, wouldn't it make sense to allocate time to a project like 12to11 so that Linux Mint can still run the latest apps and programs seamlessly and transparently to the user, even if a full and stable wayland session is still a long ways away or potentially dropped?

[Secret-chest]

In my opinion, Cinnamon on Wayland will be very hard to take beyond its current state and I think MATE on Wayfire would be a much better way.