Moving-forward asks: I've been hearing a lot about Wayland and how it's going to be great for the Linux desktop. What's the practical benefit for non-techies like me?
DistroWatch answers: For most of the past 40 years, Linux and UNIX-like operating systems (including the BSDs) have used a technology called X to display the desktop. The X display software was quite an amazing piece of technology for its time. In particular, it was really good at being network transparent. Which basically means you could run your desktop applications on one computer (like a central server) and have them show up on another computer. This was especially useful in computer labs and education centres. Since X could also run and display applications on the same machine it was practical in a lot of environments and became the default for most UNIX-like operating systems.
While X is flexible and powerful, it has some design flaws. Some approaches which made sense 40 years ago make less sense today. These days people want a consistent look for their desktop, performance over flexibility, and security is a bigger concern. Wayland is a protocol designed to address these modern concerns.
What tends to confuse people is Wayland is not a single piece of technology. Wayland is a protocol, a specification which can be implemented. As a result, each desktop environment (KDE Plasma, GNOME, etc) has its own version of Wayland.
The result is each implementation of Wayland on each desktop is slightly different. It should follow, at the least, the core Wayland protocol and be able to run applications built to support Wayland, but each desktop running the Wayland protocol will have its own quirks and features.
All of this is more theory than a practical overview. From a practical point of view, once your desktop's Wayland implementation is complete, you shouldn't notice any difference. The idea here is to basically replace X with something that, to the person using the technology, looks and acts exactly the same. Under the hood, Wayland-powered desktops will hopefully be more secure and offer better (and smoother) performance. However, whether this is true in practice will vary depending on how polished your desktop's implementation of Wayland is.
In short, you probably won't find there is any practical benefit (or drawback) to using a mature version of your desktop's Wayland session. However, behind the scenes your desktop will hopefully become more efficient and secure.