No, this is Slashdot, you can't have a serious discussion.
It's full of idiots who don't like shiny new things, idiots who adore shiny new things and both types of idiots love to shout at each other.
Ok. Seriously.
Wayland is a new architecture for the Linux graphics stack.
It merges the role of the display server and the window manager/compositor into one piece, called the Wayland compositor.
It is envisioned that writing a Wayland compositor is not more complicated than writing a X window manager/compositor.
Buttet point: We will not have A Wayland compositor, but serveral of them to choose from: Weston, Enlightenment, Mutter/Gnome Shell, KWin.
This is made possible because a) Linux now has a proper graphic driver stack and b) the Wayland protocol is much simpler.
The new model and the simplified protocol will allow
A) better control of the input (keyboard, mice). Currently, the X window manager/compositor do not have absolute control about the input. Besides posing some security risks, it makes it hard to implement some behaviors sanely. Things as simple as being able to mute the sound when you have a full screen application running are hard to do.
Wayland compositors, of course, get all the input and then they forward them to applications as they see fit.
B) better performance (except OpenGL full screen applications which already mostly bypass X). This will come from a number of place.
- Reduced number of rountrips (W app/W compositor/kernel instead of X app/X server/X compositor/X compositor/kernel).
- Better implementation (the X.org server isn't the fastest cookie in the world, but the protocol is so complex it's hard to do better)
- On embedded platforms (phones, tablets, Raspberri Pi) the compositor can be written to exploit hardware compositing capabilites (there's no good way to expose it though the X server).
Additionally, the Wayland protocol fixes several issues, some of which could be fixed with more extensions, some need breaking.
- Artifacts/tearing. X doesn't specify when the data sent by applications is drawn on the screen, so sometimes you get artifacts as the server or compositor draw the contents of a window in the middle of an application drawing. Wayland fixes this by making every frame perfect.
- Saner input model. The currently used X input extensions are too complicated (by the authors own admission), as they need to maintain backward compatibility with the X Core input model.
- Saner dynamic reconfiguration (resolution, orientation). Again, by authors admission, XRandR is too complicated.
- Binding versioning. Currently, if you have an application built upon components who support different versions of an extension (ie, input), it's a russian roulette on how it will pan out.
Bullet point: despite all the drama going on on Slashdot and other sites, the simple truth is that the majority, if not all, of the developers who actually put in time and effort to maintain and upgrade the X.org server, the X window managers we use, the application toolkits, etc seem convinced Wayland is the way forward and are putting in the time and effort needed to make it happen.
Wayland is not network transparent. And despite the drama, that's OK. Nobody cares about network transparency.
People (including me) do care about having rootless remote applications. We care to have something that works at least as well as "ssh -X".
For the short/medium term, Wayland desktops will run a X compatibility server (XWayland) and most Wayland capable applications will have a X fallback mode. So "ssh -X" will just keep working.
For a longer term solution, when we get Wayland only applications, we'll need to implement something like NX or Xpra for Wayland. Which is OK too, because for many of us, it's better than running X over the network.
Despite the capabilities of the X protocol, most X applications are in fact too bandwidth intensive and latency sensitive to run remotely outside LANs. And their developers can't be arsed to do it otherwise. That's why we use things like NX and Xpra in the first place.