Pros aren’t using Linux for color correction. They do work that requires color correctness. For example all VFX industry, a portion of movie industry, web design, app design. Do you remember when designers of Adwaita told us it was grey but we could see it was purple? Well, they were early adopters of Wayland and there you go.
If this is not done properly it will impact a lot of people jobs.
Snap, deb, rpm etc numbers are not public, but Gimp Flatpak was downloaded over quarter of a million times.
All of those people need color management.
Add to those all the Blender, Inkscape, Darktable, Rawtherapee, Scribus users etc.
That’s only the FOSS software. How about you pay 9k USD for Nuke license and then find out that Wayland doesn’t have a proper color management. Or how about Houdini, DaVinci Resolve, BorisFX users?
What about the game developers? Unreal, Unity, Godot, CRYENGINE?
People and companies are taking the effort to bring their software to Linux to take advantage of it. Is Wayland going to drive them all away and bring us to square 0?
Countless hours volunteered and paid are being pored into the development of software for Linux for which color management is a critical component. It needs to be done and it needs to be done properly before mass adoption period.
Color management in Wayland has to be at least at the MacOS level before mass adoption. Otherwise it’s better for X to stay and we just skip Wayland because color management will get implemented in Wayland one way or another but if it’s not specd out properly now then it will be hacked later when devs realize they’ve messed up. I don’t like the current Wayland one bit atm. Devs are learning as they go and are refusing to listen to experts in the field which is such a shame because they won’t pay the price, users will.