With the newer version of Gnome 3.x shells, you get an option to try Wayland sessions. You have to choose it in the login screen. I have never seen Gnome running so smoothly in X previously. Wayland is very smooth and very fast. But Wayland is still a work in progress and it may first arrive only for Gnome. While I tried, my videos files didn't play in SMPlayer and I had encountered very few gaps. (These are not bugs or glitches. These are areas where Wayland team is closing up. So it is wrong to call them bugs or issues).
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| Manjaro with GNOME 3.20 using Wayland |
Here is a short video of Wayland in action:
Fedora tried to make Wayland by default for 24 release (which will arrive by June 2016). But due to some gaps and effort needed for packaging and testing everything, that has been postponed to some later release. KDE project is also working with Wayland support and planning to make it default display server in near future. Bleeding edge distros like Arch and Fedora may get Wayland within next 12-18 months (May-Nov 20017?).
Ubuntu on the other hand is working on Mir (another display server). It was supposed to be arriving with 16.04 LTS release but it missed. Still 16.10 may not get Mir. Unity 8 and Mir are the two crucial updates which Ubuntu users are waiting for a long time. Like Internet Explorer had its own "standards", Mir is Canonical's way of doing Wayland. But Canonical has a valid reason (at least according to them) that they are working on convergence (same OS, UI, UX across all devices) and Mir is what they need. May be!
All I can see about Wayland is exclusively positive. I am confident that with Wayland, the UI will be buttery smooth, with less bugs and more security. Also I think nobody will troll Wayland like they do Systemd. Some or other day Systemd will also become the default display server. Oh my! I myself can't help trolling Systemd ;-)
