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?
Wayland is a Display Server Protocol, meaning it is a specification of how a program wanting to display something like a window communicates with another program, the display server, which handles drawing to the screen.
It matters because it vastly simplifies and modernizes display server infrastructure.
X is huge, with many parts from the 80s and 90s that were simply not needed today, creating a fully compliant X Server with all extensions was pretty much impossible, which is the reason pretty much only X.org existed as a full implementation.
Some benefits for users are no screen tearing, VRR and support for more complicated setups like having multiple monitors all with a different refresh rate, which was a pain in the ass on X but is no problem on wayland.
X is going to die, especially with the fact that frredesktop and the two big DEs, GNOME and KDE are working on it. Some distros come with wayland by default already.
