I fell into the wayland hole as well, quite recently.

It took me days to just get a compositor started, and open a terminal inside it (I chose wio as my compositor, because I don't like tiled environments).

From now on, I want to build my own compositor (if possible), mostly to understand how the wayland protocol works internally, and differs from the X protocol.

I'll be taking notes here along the way: gopher://z3bra.org/1/notes/wayland (HTTP).

For development, I prefer starting directly at the libwayland level (raw protocol), by reading the Wayland Book, by Drew Devault. When I get the hang of the raw protocol, I'll certainly realize how boring it is, and use something like wlroots, which seems to be widely agreed upon, and is pushing a lot of new protocols to the upstream wayland repo.

But for now, there are just to many concepts I don't understant well: protocols, layers, shells, surfaces, seats, …