That impression is justified. However, some individual applications may or may not (yet) fully support Wayland.
With respect GIMP, I see no indication of it being less responsive, indeed I recall it being more responsive than X11 when I initially switched. I see no obvious weirdness in how buttons are displayed.
I hadn’t noticed any scaling issues with the GIMP splash screen – admittedly, that’s because I had long ago added the --no-splash command-line argument to the GIMP launcher.
Nonetheless, the splash screen does seem smaller in comparison, and yes, it seems to have Windows decorations – perhaps the GIMP team consider this a low-priority item – though I suspect it might have more to do with GTK theming. GTK2 theming support has recently been removed upstream, and Manjaro naturally follows suit.
At face value, I find this hard to explain.
One way to help isolate problems is to create a new User account (for testing) and login to that. The point is to see whether or not these issues persist in a fresh environment – naturally, you must be using Wayland.
If any of the problems mentioned no longer exist in the fresh User account, then that strongly suggests that issue is local.
An obvious test of that theory is to install kernel 6.17 on that machine.
- Also installable via the “Kernel” icon in Manjaro Settings Manager.
Though, it’s quite possible something else might be in play.
Anecdotal: I’ve personally used Wayland for at least the past two years without signigicant issue; there were a few annoyances during the first few weeks, however.
Incidentally, this article from Nate Graham (KDE) might interest you.
Wayland is the direction the industry is taking and we, as users, have little resolve than to either adapt or be left behind.
The following, noted in the Update Announcement, is only the more visible part of the initiative, and no doubt there is much more to come.