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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Wayland's major "technical merits", as far as I can tell, are a lack of screen tearing, slightly faster rendering under some circumstances and better handling of touchscreens. That's it. If you don't have a touchscreen and aren't a gamer (few non-gamers care all that much about tearing or about framerates above 60Hz), Wayland has no real advantages to the user that I'm aware of.
X is network-transparent, more widely compatible, and arguably more extensible. Most users don't care about those things either.
Wayland has an advantage in attracting developers because it has less accumulated technical debt and general code cruft. That doesn't make it better for users, though. Most Wayland evangelists I run into seem to be devs who are more interested in the design of the graphics stack than whether it makes a difference in the real world.
So, as with so many things, "merit" is in the eye of the beholder. People should use what works for them.
Also better isolation of applications and better support for multiple screens.
I'll give you the multiple screens (not a use case I have myself, so I don't pay attention to support quality). Isolation of applications is another thing that most users don't really care that much about, I would say.
It's legitimately important if you want to be able to pull random software from places and not have your system compromised, a la smartphone OSes.
It's not the whole story -- things still aren't entirely sandboxed aside from that -- but without it, the GUI is a big security hole.
users shouldn't have to care about security. it should be the baseline.
You never care about security until you get your credentials stolen
And don't forget 1:1 gestures and the Crash-Resilient Wayland Compositing that keep the application alive even tho the "compositor" crash, so it does restart without any data loss.
Edit: forgot to mention the lockscreen protocol, because on xorg if the lockscreen crash then you view the desktop and you have the device unlocked!
Let's not forget HiDPI. Everything with a HiDPI display is borderline unusable on Linux with X.Org.