You can't blame long, awkward pauses and the arrival of an "impromptu debugging session" on the act of trying to code in front of an audience. That's like saying all plays suck because of the terrible actors in one that you saw.
Wait until the only way to run FF / Chrome / 3-d accelerated video driver / vi / emacs / something else thats "critical" is to switch to Mir. After all its free, all you have to do is abandon everything else. What could go wrong?
Simply don't use it is like telling people to take up a new hobby once theirs has been destroyed. But I don't want to take up a new hobby and I like this one. Sorry, no, someone else has decided to destroy it, so don't complain or try to work around the damage just select a new hobby. Hey, you look like a technical type of person, sorry about the death of free software and all that, but I bet you'd like Ham Radio or maybe advanced model railroading? ...
If a free software program decided to stop supporting X and Wayland, it would be because no one cared enough to contribute the code for continued support, which would imply that very few people were still choosing to use X or Wayland over Mir. If Mir really ends up being that wonderful, why shouldn't it win?
How does one free software program replacing another constitute the death of free software?
vi or emacs? Not going to happen, these are among the most portable software that exists.
About Chrome or FF that's only depends on the developers who use the product, I doubt that Google will ever target Mir, actually I believe that the GTK+ backend could target Mir and then boom, all GTK+ applications will then run on Mir, including Chrome. If Google ever comes to target a system with their browser this will probably be Chrome OS.
Firefox is another beast, but unless there's a decision to abandon Linux altogether there'll be devs working on it, or on iceweasel, it's Debian cousin, and this will probably run/compile in every Linux (and BSDs?) out there.
About 3D this is a shit area, I believe this move signals that Canonical will try to sell ARM computers in the future, there's a know lack of free drivers for GPUs in the ARM world. To see what I mean you'll only have to search for the Raspberry Pi "open source" GPU drivers debacle to see how things are going. This is not a criticism of Broadcom who has it's trade secrets to protect, but there the situation is far from perfect and always will be.
I use Linux and I don't even use a graphical environment most of the time because all it does is slow me down. (When I do use one, it's Ratpoison.) The most effective Linux developers I know work similarly. I believe this is a large cause of us being "senselessly married to terrible in-group traditions and the status quo".
I don't know if you're calling all Linux users idiots or what, but I consider Linux idiots as the people who use Ubuntu and Unity and don't have any idea whats going on underneath. They obviously aren't going to be doing any replacing of X.
TD;LR Linux is not one thing. Various projects are not mutually exclusive
We have GNU/Linux with a huge array of applications all licensed in such a way as to allow forking and customisation.
We have different groups of users of desktop/laptops; sysadmins; developers; scientific users; people who use administered desktops at work (e.g. French police &c)
We have a smallish and very pushy company in the UK (Canonical) who want to build on GNU/Linux to produce an operating system (Ubuntu) that will work on TVs, phones, tablets, fridges &c. Their target audience won't be developing alternatives to X, and probably won't be writing bash scripts or anything. (That isn't to say that some their users won't be doing those things).
We have a much larger company in the US (Redhat) who provide a stable conservative desktop as a compliment to their commercially supported server OS (RHEL). They part fund a desktop system that has changed radically recently (Gnome).
There is a German based company that make an enterprise desktop OS and server OS and who contribute to the development of a different desktop environment (KDE)
We have a not-for-profit foundation type entity who push out a version of GNU/Linux that can run on a huge range of architectures (Debian)
There is this thing called 'upstream'. Small projects push out all kinds of applications including alternative desktop environments.
So Canonical does its thing, some of the stuff they do may get back into the mainstream GNU/Linux, some may not. Some hardware manufacturer may or may not take up the system. I may be able to dock my phone to a keyboard/mouse/monitor and write documents in LibreOffice and edit podcasts/photos in a couple of years or 5. (bring that on).
The others carry on as they do now. You may have to choose the graphics card more carefully in future but I hope not. I suspect workstation class computers with separate monitor/bases will get more expensive and specialised anyway, and I imagine someone will do a 'high end workstation-OS' just for them.
I don't care how ridiculous it looks, I think this is an amazing idea. I do not do well in public places and have to find a way to detach every once in awhile or I gradually get more and more irritated. This pillow is a godsend.
The next $75 I get is going straight to this.
Plan before you present.