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echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
will give you X11 if on X, wayland if on wayland.
X, specifically version 11 was a display "windower"/"manager"/"server" since 1987 for all OS's of the unix family.
why? well because there has to be one, without one nothing shows up on the screen and the server-client design pattern is great for tackling almost any problem even and especially draw calls.
but it's 32 years old now.
did this code's old age come with any caveats? well yes it was ill adapted to multi screen as it was conceived in a day where multi-screen wasn't a thing and it also had poor performance on remote desktop and redraws.
most importantly it took on a gargantuan Swiss knife aspect over the years with it's code becoming more and more of a nightmare to contribute to.
the main devs were perfectly willing to see it phagocyte the entire system.
X could handle boot, loading for you, it could boot, it could be a lightweight DE. basically, taken to the extreme you could have "X as an OS".
more pertinently to modern-day issues X was wholly incompatible with "modern" graphical 3D libraries the likes of directX version 10 and above. only OpenGL has a working X implementation.
evidently there were regular cries over the years of "replace!" going as far back as 1990 (Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System by Gajewska, Manasse and McCormack)
the reason they never really came to a head is the spread out and small nature of the linux community. it was hard to pull through or at least justify a team effort in that respect. And keeping a team together until the end for this huge task was hard in the context of open source.
2008 was the year of "Enough is enough!". I like to imagine it was spurred on by Bryan Lunduke and his controversially popular "Linux Sucks" conferences.
Kristian Høgsberg initiated and led the effort with a project called "Wayland".
in 2013 Canonical who had been pressured to jump on board disappointed everyone by stating they didn't like wayland's direction and forked parts of Wayland to start their own project, "Mir", when they had previously stated that they would use Wayland in 2010.
And the race was off Mir vs Wayland. Big bucks vs open source and free dev.
in the end Canonical dropped mir and the desktop interface named "Unity" simultaneously, they admitted they were wrong by adopting Gnome (and therefore wayland because they had not started porting Unity to wayland in the meantime) and everyone loved canonical/ubuntu again (for a while).
The Fedora devs had pulled through and managed a full Desktop Environement implementation of Wayland in version 24 with their first partial Wayland release being Fedora version 20 in 2013.
Ubuntu never had a feature-complete Mir Unity8 setup for the desktop. In the 19th of October 2017, canonical released ubuntu 17.10 with opt-in wayland support. same for 18.04 in 2018 and now in 2019 wayland is installed on ubuntu 19.04 although, you have to switch to a wayland login session first (the default one is still X). Wayland has been on many other distributions for awhile. (red hat 8, fedora 24, manjaro)
the only desktop environments that support wayland are KDE, gnome, and Enlightenment (that I know of, googling this was a bit hard) (Enlightenment is not noteworthy IMO).
so if you use another you won't have wayland on.
Wayland came with many performance improvements, overall better feel and support for the Vulkan 3D graphics library which has perfect feature-parity / theoretically surpasses direct X 12.
you can test Vulkan out with Dota 2 :
it's implementation will be truely put to the test with the Linux release of Ashes of the Singularity and Star Citizen
I'd say knowing the version number of your OS, the Desktop Environment (if it's gnome/KDE/Enlightenment or not) and the Distribution you are using are the only three factors you need, if you wish to know if you have wayland or not.
mint 19 being based on ubuntu 18 it's default session is not wayland, it's X, but you can create and log into a wayland session from the login screen (normally, .....if you migrated versions it may not be an option)
I would recommend switching to any other OS as mint will receive less and less support going forward. if you're used to the desktop layout of mint I recommend you go with pop OS (it uses a gnome modified in a way that IMO makes it look like mint).