In short a graphics interface with code that is not old af!

In short it’s essentially a protocol that defines what type of requests must be sent between applications and a compositor.

Okay, I’m not OP but a follow up question that occurs to me reading the explanations of what Wayland is, is are there any distros or spins of distros that use Wayland by default?

Waland is the British half of the mega corp Waland-Yutani. Sometimes called Wa-Yu, or simply “the company”

Founded by Charles Bishop Wayland, the totally not evil billionaire industrialist, Wayland LLC was known for energy production, computer technology, and planetary terraforming before it was acquired in a hostile takeover by the Japanese Yutani corp in 2099.

Super-short version:

The system that Linux uses to draw anything on the screen (showing the desktop, your windows, their contents, etc) is called a display server.

Linux has been using a display server called the X Window System (or x11) since its inception, but it’s ancient and has limitations that can’t be fixed without breaking everything that depends on it.

The Wayland compositor is the new display server that will be replacing x11, improving security and adding support for newer features like HDR. It’s nearly ready for a full release now, and is already the default for some Linux distributions.

Programs running graphically (Firefox, your file browser, etc.) need a way to tell the system “draw these pixels here”. That’s what the display server does; it takes all these applications, works out where their windows are and manages that pixel data.

XOrg has historically been the display server in common use, but it’s very old and very cobbled together. It generally struggles with “modern” things that must people expect today. Multimonitor setups, vsync, hdr and all that. They work, but support is hacked together and brittle.

Wayland is a replacement for XOrg that was designed from scratch to fix a lot of these issues. But it’s been an uphill battle because XOrg is the final boss of legacy codebases.

tl;dr They’re both software that manages drawing pixels from applications to the display.

Wayland is a display protocall. What does that mean? Well, it describes how a program on linux tha displays graphics to a user should work. Examples of programs which do this include kwin, mutter, and sway. It’s why you see stuff on your monitor and why when you open an app, it’s in a window, which can be moved.

All that along with a good amount of supplementary tools, makes up wayland.

Currently we are transitioning from a 40 year old protocal called X11 which has many issues and few people willing to work on. Wayland offers a codebase without the spaghetti, more security, easier feature development, and to a point backwards compatibility.

I have been sort of following Wayland’s development for over 10 years now. I have been using Wayland for over 2 years now. I have been reading and watching various lengthy arguments online for and against it. I still don’t feel like I actually know it even is, not beyond some handwavey superficialities. Definitely not to the extent and depth I could understand what X11 was and how to actually work with it, troubleshoot it when necessary and achieve something slightly unusual with it. I feel like, these days, you are either getting superficial marketing materials, ELI5 approaches that seem to be suited at best to pacify a nosy child without giving them anything to actually work with, or reference manuals full of unexplained jargon for people who already know how it works and just need to look up some details now and then…

Maybe I’m getting old. I used to like Linux because I could actually understand what was going on…