The benefit for Amazon is good PR and supporting open source projects their engineers use.

You can check if you are using Xorg or Wayland in the Settings -> System -> About -> System Details page. If you're using Wayland, you're all good, nothing changes. If you're using Xorg, you may notice some changes. If you're using NVIDIA on Ubuntu 24.04, you'll be on Xorg by default. If you're using a later version or AMD/Intel, you'll be on Wayland be default.

To keep it short, X11 was the old protocol for creating and managing windows. Xorg implemented this protocol. But both the protocol and implementation have many shortcomings that are difficult to address for a multitude of reasons (breaking compatibility, poor code base, a ton of work, etc).

Rather than putting lipstick on a pig, a new protocol, called Wayland, was created. It was designed for modern needs and tries to avoid the pitfalls that X11, Windows, and MacOS have. It doesn't just copy what those three did, it's more opinionated, so some people love it a lot (like me) or hate it a lot because it changes the way things have to be done and simply does not implement some functionality, either purposefully or because the work hasn't been done yet.

Gnome isn't locked-in. For being an important open source project, AWS has given Gnome credits so that they can use AWS free of charge for years. Once those credits expire, they are free to leave. So long as they do their proper preparation to migrate away, they get multiple years of hosting for free.

Gnome has already been in this circumstance. Their free hosting from another provider expired so they moved. Though as I'm researching this, I can't find the sources I've read this from.

Could you please explain further?

How does free infrastructure hosting from AWS hurt anyone? There’s no privacy concerns and this helps Gnome’s development.

The only way this will hurt is if Gnome is not prepared to switch away once their credits are up.

Amazon is giving this service to Gnome for free. If anything, this is hurting them.

For some reason, this has been getting a lot of push back on Gnome's Mastodon.

Keep in mind that this changes nothing for you as a Gnome user. It changes little even if you develop for Gnome. However, this frees of a lot of resources for Gnome. Gnome is getting the infrastructure for all their needs for free (for now) and don't need to worry about maintenance of the hardware.

I don't use Zoom enough to know, but it probably still works.

My last experience with the Zoom app on Wayland (a few months ago?) required me to do a manual config file change to launch the app properly. And Zoom says they fixed the screen sharing options, not sure how true that is.

Getting ready for Zoom to have instructions to install i3 rather than fixing their Wayland support.

Clickbait. The VP Engineering for Ubuntu made a post that he was looking into using the Rust utils for Ubuntu and has been daily driving them and encouraged others to try

It’s by no means certain this will be done.

Overall, I don't think Mozilla is wrong. Without the Google Search deal, Firefox will have less resources to build a competent browser.

But Mozilla has also done a poor job at becoming financially stable without this search deal. It also doesn't help that Mozilla's CEO's salary keeps going up in spite of the declining market share.

It would have been nice is Mozilla was able to fill a niche like Proton: building a suite of secure and private services. But instead they're moving towards advertising.

Before Wayland, there was X Window System, created in 1984. X Window System was designed in a time where you had one good computer connected to multiple displays used by different people. X went through many versions but version 11 (X11) stayed around for a long time.

But the architecture just isn't good. It wasn't designed for modern needs. MacOS used to use X, but replaced it to fit modern needs. Windows didn't use X, but they too updated Windows to fit modern needs. But Linux and other OSs stuck with X for a lot longer, hacking it to make it work. Honestly, it's amazing how well it does work.

But isn't not great. It wasn't designed with security in mind, it doesn't do multi-monitor well. Behind the scenes, it considers everything to be one giant display; issues arise when it comes to mixed-dpi displays and when monitor refresh rates don't match. It's also just a bloated, old code base that people don't want to work on. Fixing X would not only be difficult, but would break compatibility.

So people got working on a modern replacement for X aiming to avoid its issues. Wayland is leaner, more opinionated, and designed for how modern hardware operates. Wayland itself is just a protocol (like X11), and there's many different implementations of that protocol: Mutter, Kwin, wlroots, smithay, Mir, Weston, etc. Meanwhile X11 pretty much only had one relevant implementation, Xorg. Wayland's diversity has its pros and cons. Pros include (1) you can create your implementation in any programming language you want rather than being stuck to just one, (2) an implementation can fill just the needs on the person making it rather than trying to generalize it for everyone. But cons include the fact that this fragmentation leads to scenarios where one implementation supports something that others don't and implementation-specific bugs.

Wayland's opinionated design is also draws criticisms. It gives a lot of control to the compositors rather than windows, which is how Xorg, MacOS, and Windows work. Nvidia's wayland adoption was also slow and terrible. It took many years to get it into the only decent shape it's in now.

I don’t get why this sort of picture always gets posted and upvoted when it’s wrong for most distros nowadays.