I also want to point out that you will likely get a better Wayland experience on KDE. They are much more active in implementing Wayland protocols and overall it feels more solid.

This makes me sad because I really like how Gnome looks like, but Gnome developers don't seem to care as much about Wayland stuff.

I have been a KDE user since 2010. I've started this habit a few years ago that every time I upgrade my desktop distro's release, which is twice per year (first Kubuntu, now NixOS), I try out the wayland mode for a while, until I find the bugs to be too annoying. A few years ago I switched back after a couple of hours. The last time I tried I remained there for 3 months. So yes, a lot has improved, but I'm still back on X11.

I'd also confirm this. Gnome started out ahead by virtue of being the target or idealization of most of Wayland's features, but it's stagnated. Nothing is ever improved and they refuse to fix the technical problems holding them back, like the lack of I/O being separated from drawing in Mutter. They claimed to have improved it several times, but it's just as bad as ever. Either they're hesitant, or they just don't have the time and resources to break and rebuild it properly.

Meanwhile, KDE/Plasma's kwin finally stepped past them. And there's also the kwinft project that's rebasing kwin idiomatically as a wlroots compositor.

We may finally get full Wayland adoption, but I don't think Gnome is going to be prominent in it anymore.

> It puts quite a bit of pressure on desktop environment developers and it seems like they don't really care about many of the defined protocols.

The problem is that the existing protocols are missing key functionality that desktop environment developers need (source: I am one).

Want to list all the toplevel windows that are on a particular workspace so you can write a pager or taskbar widget? Nope, can't do it. The foreign-toplevel protocol and ext-worspace protocol (the latter of which has been in standardization purgatory for 2-3 years now) don't know anything about each other, so you can't do that.

Want to write a widget that lists windows and lets you do a bunch of operations on them? Well, you can, if all you care about is minimize, maximize, fullscreen, and close. If you want to pin/unpin windows, move them between workspaces, resize them, or move them around on the current workspace... nope, can't do it.

That's just two examples off the top of my head. Looking at the list of Wayland protocols, and then digging in to figure out what they provide shows them to be immature and severely lacking.

>Want to list all the toplevel windows that are on a particular workspace so you can write a pager or taskbar widget?

I can do this with a trivial "jq" script in Sway with this command:

    swaymsg -t get_tree 

Not sure why it wouldn't be possible for other compositors to offer an interface for this like Sway does.