gplaces VS woof-CE

~$ sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y git gcc libc6-dev make pkg-config libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libidn2-dev libidn11-dev libmagic-dev ~$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/dimkr/gplaces ~$ cd gplaces ~$ make PREFIX=/usr CONFDIR=/etc ~$ sudo make install

For me, the best small side projects involve some kind of porting (between protocols, OSs or CPUs), contribution of a fix for a visible but mysterious bug, or revival of codebases in bad shape, especially when they're unfamiliar and written by others. You can learn a lot from a software engineering culture that's different from yours or small, feasible projects that allow you to understand the bits and bytes of something unfamiliar in a fun and useful way. These projects are great to develop flexibility and general problem solving intuition. And getting familiar with the 20% of an idea, a protocol, a programming language, etc' that's used 80% of the time in real-world use cases, is often enough.

https://github.com/dimkr/gplaces (Gopher -> Gemini port)

> What I mostly meant was that for people who prefer to use X11, that will probably remain viable for a long time, without any Wayland.

Or, if necessary, with just a tiny bit of Wayland; XWayland rootful mode lets you run a full X stack with Wayland as little more than a shim to the graphics driver. As a worked example, Puppy Linux implemented this: https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/woof-CE/pull/2265