Wayland vs Xorg/X11

Xorg/X11

Earlier it was mentioned that there are two different desktop backends for Linux. Linux has historically used the Xorg desktop which the last version of was X11. This has worked fairly well but it was introduced decades ago before Linux even existed and lacks modern expectations for displays such as Variable Refresh Rate and true support for multiple monitors. Multiple monitors was done by tricking the desktop into thinking all the monitors were part of one single giant display instead of being multiple displays. This also meant that every monitor had to run at the same refresh rate. So if you had a 120hz screen and a 60hz screen, both could only run at 60hz if they were both plugged in.

Wayland

Wayland on the other hand is a much newer backend that is able to support modern display features: Variable Refresh Rate, true multi monitor support, and mixed refresh rates between monitors all work out of the box on the Wayland versions of your desktop. While this is overall the better option, there are some things that Wayland still lacks such as Global Hotkeys, and Keylogging (for use in Input Overlay in OBS) . So if you set CTRL+ALT+3 to activate a VTuber toggle, that shortcut will only work if your Vtuber app window is in focus. NVIDIA support on Wayland also tends to lag behind AMD, though NVIDIA has started to rapidly improve this as of this year.

There are Pros and Cons to both, so make sure you are aware of each one's features and how to work around them. Wayland is the default on most popular distros and is rapidly solving the remaining issues it has, so don't worry about your choice being permanent. On almost all distros you can freely swap between X11 and Wayland by installing whichever one was not default and logging out.