I know I could duckduckgo it, but I think we're at the stage at lemmy where there's space to ask basic questions.
What is it? Why does it matter? Users at which lunix proficiency level should care about it? Is it just yet another competing standard or is x actually going to die?
In short, Wayland is a protocol for graphics.
It's somewhat similar to X, as its main purpose is the same, however the archivecture is very different, and Wayland is much simpler/barebone.
If X is going to die or not — only time will tell. For now it can be considered another competing standard.
On top of what other said, the wayland project also maintains the wayland protocols repository which includes additional protocols that are approved by a "committee" that includes representatives from wayland protocol implementations (wlroots, kde , gnome , smithay etc). for example now they are working on color management.
There appears to be a consensus among people working on window manager implementations that X has to go and wayland is the future.
Wayland has technical benefits, if you want the nitty gritty details see this.
Basically X11 is bad IPC at this point.
Also be careful with what you read online, I see misinformation about it relatively often.
You’ve already gotten great answers on what Wayland is, but as far as who should care:
Mainly developers and users with niche workflows. People with NVIDIA cards should care a little as initially NVIDIA did not support Wayland, but NVIDIA drivers are catching up so this should continue to improve. Most users should just switch when their DE switches.
Great answers here. I'd just like to add that X and Wayland are not completing. In fact, most of the Xorg devs are the ones working on Wayland. You can find Wayland mentioned in the Xorg Foundation Website.
I don't know anything about Linux, but I believe they merged with the Yutani Corporation in 2099.
Wayland is the fancy new standard that never seems to stably work for me on any of my machines :( Thanks for letting me revert to X in the login screen, GNOME.
