Thanks for the very kind words, but a shudder goes down my spine every time I hear someone has looked at my orrery code! I consider it to be a mess - very poor (actually, almost no) separation of the UI code from the calculations code, for example. There is also stuff in there that was intended to make performance tolerable for Openmoko phones, which does not make sense for more modern devices and should be stripped out.

Regarding your real question, I guess I've been both lazy and poorly informed. For example, I thought that Wayland would provide the sort of effortless X11 compatibility one gets on Mac OS X. It looks like that is not the case. The thing I personally need *most* is X11 server mode on my handheld, displaying for a remote client. It doesn't look to me like that's available either with SailfishOS or Ubuntu Touch. For those OSs it looks like X11 capability, at best, supports local X11 clients. And there are these little caveats like "input doesn't work", etc., which make a big difference to me. Using VNC is much more cumbersome than having a real X11 server, and some of the remote machines I work with are headless.

I guess my best course is to wait for Pyra. If both my n900s (and any neo900 that I get my hands on) die before Pyras ship, my best course might then be to try to get SailfishOS running on a Nexus 5 (or whatever is the best "supported" hardware at that time) and try to strip out Wayland and substitute X11.

The fragmentation of Linux display managers into X11, Surfaceflinger, Wayland and Mir is certainly a grim development. I know X11 is full of ancient cruft and providing full X11 server compatibility involves supporting crazy things like its old, ugly pixel fonts, but given Android's huge market share, I think Jolla and Ubuntu should have just gone with Surfaceflinger.

The real irony is that if Apple were to implement the X11 capability in iOS that they provide in Mac OS X, my best choice for managing remote Linux servers would be an iPhone!