The "TLDR" is sub heading is completely misleading. Cinnamon devs see they have to move, that's the reason. "Begging to work" on Wayland is not at all what the article says. Before you downvote, read it. Nothing in that article or the link to one dev's blog says anything even remotely like that.
XFCE wants to be Wayland ready with XFCE 4.20, which should be released near the end of 2024. Cinnamon wants to have Wayland as default by 2026. So, in theory at least, XFCE should be Wayland-ready before Cinnamon.
At least the Mint devs are being realistic on the time span needed for Wayland to have a chance at working for everyone, unlike Fedora, KDE, and Gnome that are jumping the gun.
Cinnamon and XFCE are outliers in that they try to be super stable, "complete" desktops, compared to GNOME and KDE that try to be bleeding edge and packed with new and changing features.
Benefits to both, but I can respect why Cinnamon and XFCE have been slow to adopt Wayland (to a fault, many would argue)
Nvidia has been decent on Wayland from my experience. Then again my experience has just been 5 days, but it feels snappier than X11 I kinda like the feel.
It's a very slow moving project by design for better or for worse. There also hasn't been a ton of developer interest in the DE space in supporting it until the last few years since it would necessarily take resources away from other work, and generally X has been "good enough" until recently. I don't have anything to back this up but I suspect that the increased accessibility of gaming on Linux as well as HRR and HDR displays entering the mainstream had a lot to do with this renewed interest.
It's still got issues even now, but back then they were big enough that you had to really want to use it, casual users would have become quickly frustrated.
Is that satire? Wayland is pretty great, and there isn't really a concept of "compatible app" as Xwayland handles that.
Obviously apps that perform X functions directly (clipboard managers, screen recorders, etc.) will need to be ported or rewritten, as it's a brand new display manager, but that would be the case with any non-X platform.
The creators of Linux Mint and the Cinnamon desktop are experimenting with the Wayland protocol – and so is the original developer of Xfce.
Normally, the project's experimental repository, codenamed "Romeo," is private, and code is only opened to the public once it reaches beta test stage.
Cinnamon 6.0, planned for Mint 21.3 this year, will feature experimental Wayland support, but he warns folks not to expect too much at this early stage:
It was the first release that defaulted to the then-new Unity desktop, and at the time, the Reg didn't rate it very highly.
As his new blog reveals, so is Red Hat developer Olivier Fourdan, who has been working on a rootful mode for XWayland.
What is possibly more interesting is that Monsieur Fourdan has a previous claim to fame: he is the original author of the Xfce desktop, which he started building way back in 1996, as he mentions in this 2009 interview.
The original article contains 484 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It's not actually based on the year. There have been 21 other major releases at various intervals starting with 1.0 in 2006. It just happens to be close to the current year right now.