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I don't know who Wayland is
(i.imgflip.com)
If anyone wants to give an ELI5 or a link to a video that ELI5 I'd be incredibly thankful
I swear that all the stuff I find is like super in depth technical stuff that just loses me in no time flat
In short it's essentially a protocol that defines what type of requests must be sent between applications and a compositor.
I don't know what compositor is and at this point I'm too afraid to ask
It draws on the screen what programs and the desktop environment tell it to -- including opacity, tiling, clicks, drags, updates, etc. Everything you visually perceive on the monitor is the product of the compositor.
Okay but why is it seemingly always associated with gaming? Anytime someone mentions Linux gaming, I often hear people asking them if they're using Wayland.
I'll step aside for a longer answer on this one. But, I can say that for my usecase (which is mainly gaming on my home PC on an all AMD build with KDE on Arch) it is noticeably and measurably faster than X11. We're talking 2-15 (the median is around 4 or 5) FPS depending on the game on 144hz screens.
See what you did?! Now there's two of them!