Part of this is not about how politics affects open source world. It's about lack of open discussion and transparency. Certainly it'd be wrong for linus to call the opponents "trolls" from Russia.

I mean, no, it wouldn't, if the opponentns are largely, in fact, trolls and paid actors backed, directly or indirectly, by the Russian state.

Wayland has a few glitches, but in general it's good to use.

For example, it doesn't have an API to get current cursor position (which breaks keepassxc's browser popup, goldendict's query popup), an API (which most compositor implements) to get current window state, which makes me unable to find an alternative of autokey (kwin script can do this, though, but it lacks the ability to execute arbitary commands..).

On the other hand, I don't see a killing feature that drives people switch to wayland.. (HDR can be one, but I don't use it) I mean, yeah X11 is old and unmaintained, but it WORKS.

Lack of screentearing is the killer app for me. The only GUI programs I run are Firefox, a terminal (foot or wezterm), and video games, so everything works and works better (I dont want screentearing for any of those 3) for me under Wayland.

I just run Compton as compositor and the tearing is gone, which makes hard to move to Wayland and having to solve issues that I currently don't have.

I used it first with XFCE and later with i3.

The lack of screen tearing is a big feature to me, but sometimes people get x11 to work without this being a problem.

The other feature for me is security. Sandboxes can access the wayland socket and run GUI stuff, without the ability to read the entire screen or run commands that effect outside of the sandbox.

The wayland socket is a unix socket, exists as a regular file. Gating access to the socket works like any other file.

X11 has some interesting issues here. It creates an "abstract socket". These exists as files on the file system, but they are not regular files.

An interesting exmaple: A sandbox that starts with a fresh root and bind mounts in only what is required. Even when you don't bind the socket into the sandbox, the sandbox can still access it!

There are ways to prevent sandboxes from accessing the x11 socket, but this is definitely not what I would have expected!

With wayland, if the socket is not bind'ed into the sandbox, it can't be accessed, it behaves as expected!

This might not seem that important, but these features bring Linux desktop out of the 1900s with regards to security. Software like flatpak would not be able to effectively sandbox GUIs at all without wayland, a feature other platforms have supported for at least a decade or more!

The Linux desktop isn't making great use of this and related technology yet, on the standard distro, by default, applications can read your GPG keys and other important data, or even delete it. Wayland is a step towards fixing this!