One of the major Linux distributions deprecating the standard Unix windowing stack with no compelling replacement is surprising more or less on its own merits.
Wayland works pretty well, much better in some ways and not quite as well in others. I use Wayland on my desktop simply because it works better and the experience is more janky under X.
Except most major distros have been shipping with wayland as the default for a while now. X has been considered deprecated from a long while now (at least 2019) when all the devs went to go work on wayland
This is overstating the issue. Wayland in 2019 was entirely unfit for purpose due to poor hardware support, inability to scale applications which required xwayland properly or at all, being near useless for gaming, and poor screen sharing support.
Possibly your grandma who only uses her laptop to browse facebook could have used it as long as you carefully ensured she didn't have unsupported hardware AND you felt like explaining one more technical detail that no average us should have to learn about to her.
It appears to be mostly acceptable as of just this year and only if you run quite up to date software.
That’s a bit of a misrepresentation, while Wayland indeed had quite a bit of development in the last few years (which is the order of things in the bazaar style of development - the more people use it, the more care it gets), it always supported every hardware linux supported, it only builds on that after all. X just had some hacky way of bundling proprietary drivers for better support for nvidia cards.
Also, scaling of wayland applications worked, that was a major factor of the whole protocol change.
> Inability to scale applications which required xwayland properly or at all
Scaling for wayland applications worked however scaling for xwayland apps absolutely did not. The actual reality is a blurry mess and as you go back further you see more and more apps that only run via xwayland.
Due to the scattered way different features are handled on Wayland nonblurry scaled xwayland apps became or will become available at different times. For instance KDE fixed this issue in 5.26 which became part of Kubuntu with 23.04 released last month. For Debian users this day has not yet come and for many who update their software only infrequently to major releases xwayland apps may take years to become a reality.
> it always supported every hardware linux supported
That’s more than a bit of a misrepresentation. In practice, people with NVIDIA cards could run Xorg, and could not run Wayland compositors. You can use whatever wordplay you want to pretend otherwise, but Wayland absolutely did not support all the hardware that Xorg on Linux supported.
As I mentioned, nvidia didn’t support Linux. That’s an objective fact, the kernel has an abstraction that allows managing buffers independently from the actual drivers. This was for a long time not supported by nvidia proprietary drivers, as they went their own way implementing a different abstraction.
Xorg was deemed a big enough target that nvidia hacked the driver so that it could be binary patched to make better use of their proprietary drivers, but that was never the proper way of the kernel.
Wayland has nothing to do with it, it builds on standard linux kernel systems.