I recently bit the bullet. Good bye Windows. Its been a few weeks, really enjoying it. I have dabbled in Linux before, mainly with Mint/Debian.
I am trying to decide on a DE, MATE is probably my favorite, however I keep hearing about Wayland. I don’t really understand what it does, apart from being new (which makes me want to use it). KDE can support Wayland and I find KDE ok as well. Is it worth it or will wayland make little difference to me?
I mainly game, some photo editing, document writing sometimes, usual internet browsing etc.
Wayland sucks. My advice is to stick to Xorg, for the time being (most likely indefinitely).
Plasma is great, definitely my 1st choice of a DE. But if you like MATE better, stick to MATE. Don’t worry about Wayland, especially as a newbie. As you get more experienced, you’ll see whether Wayland is something you’d appreciate, but for now, do yourself a favour and stick to Xorg.
I wouldn’t recommend picking a DE based just on Wayland. In some cases its worth it, but it would entirely depend on the user and use case. Find the DE that fits you, THEN if it has Wayland support see if it works for you.
I use Plasma Xorg on my 17 inch ASUS ROG gaming laptop. I use Plasma Wayland on my Surface Pro 8. Wayland is great for touch screen devices, especially with the new touch gestures added to KDE Plasma for Wayland. That being said, if you don’t have a touch screen or a display that will benefit from Wayland, it’s best to stick to Xorg. Just about every application you want to use, with the exception of Waydroid, will work better in Xorg than Wayland.
You can stick with Xorg unless you hit a limitation of Xorg like multmonitors with different refresh rates or experience an bug
I use Wayland just because my games were crashing on Xorg but don’t on Wayland.