> Wayland sounds like its benefits are all nerd stuff that I don't care about (a "better" architecture or whatever).
Kind of.
If you have a Retina display, for instance, Wayland is superior out of the box. Unless an application is written all stupid, it has a good chance of rendering at the correct scale while looking crisp. It's possible to do this with X11 or Xwayland, but I found it requires more tweaking of individual app settings and GTK environment variable to get it to look right. But even then, try using both X11 and Wayland apps together and get both kinds to look right on your HiDPI display without one or the other looking fuzzy or incorrectly scaled. I found it virtually impossible, thus it's better to just go with either one or the other. Although I think it would have been better to actually fix X11, Wayland does actually do most things better. HiDPI is one of them, and the other is vsync. I haven't seen Wayland cause horizontal tearing, but X11 always gave me this issue. A popular Stack Exchange question titled "Why is video tearing such a problem on Linux?" was written by me as a result of having tried my best to get my Linux installations to not experience horizontal tearing but inevitably failed no matter what display or graphics card I was using. I'm glad that someone in the Linux sphere decided to take vsync seriously and make it a non-issue with Wayland.
The average person doesn't need to know about Wayland, especially if they are going with a Wayland-based distro and not changing anything about it.
The only reason one would need to know about it, besides if they are writing a compositor, is if they are trying to customize their Linux distribution. In that case, they may be in for a world of hurt, because it may not be so easy as to install all the Linux apps they know and love and have everything look and play nice.
That's I think what gets to people like me. Linux is great for the server and containers, but as far as the desktop goes, it's still trying to figure out what it wants to be all these decades later. The idea that you can make it anything you want is true more in principal than in practice. Luckily, I think I have found my happy place with my customized version of Debian that I'm rolling for my own personal use, but that was after countless hours of trying things until they worked. If I wasn't willing to put in that effort and risk having nothing to show for it, I'd have dismissed Linux as a joke and just used macOS everywhere instead.
