F41 Change Proposal: Wayland-only GNOME Workstation Media (self-contained)

Project Discussion Change Proposals
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Wayland-only GNOME Workstation Media

This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

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Announced

:link: Summary

Remove the GNOME X11 packages from the Fedora Workstation media. The packages will remain available in the repositories maintained by the GNOME SIG, but not preinstalled on the media anymore.

:link: Owner

:link: Detailed Description

As part of the upstream deprecation and effort to remove X11 support from GNOME, Fedora Workstation media will no longer include the GNOME X11 packages. The packages will remain in the repository (maintained by the GNOME SIG/Workstation WG) for users to manually install at this time.

:link: Feedback

:link: Benefit to Fedora

This aligns us with the effort going on upstream to deprecate and retire the GNOME X11 session. It also partly aligns us with Fedora KDE. Like the Fedora KDE SIG, the Fedora Workstation WG recommends and supports the Wayland platform for graphics.

Fedora Workstation has a long history of developing and promoting the Wayland experience for GNOME, and it has been the primary experience for all users (including those with NVIDIA cards) since Fedora Linux 36. This reaffirms our commitment to the Wayland GNOME experience in furtherance of the goal to provide the highest quality GNOME experience through Fedora Workstation.

:link: Scope

  • Proposal owners: Drop the GNOME X11 packages from the GNOME groups in comps and replace them with their Wayland counterparts. Pull request: pagureio#fedora-comps#972

  • Other developers: N/A (not needed for this Change)

  • Release engineering: N/A (not needed for this Change)

  • Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)

  • Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

  • Alignment with the Fedora Strategy: N/A (not needed for this Change)

:link: Upgrade/compatibility impact

Systems upgrading from older releases of Fedora Workstation will not be impacted, as this only affects new installs.

:link: Early Testing (Optional)

Not applicable to this change.

:link: How To Test

Not applicable to this change, as we’re only dropping a non-default experience from the media.

:link: User Experience

Going forward until the X11 session packages are fully dropped, users will need to manually install them from the repository if they need it.

:link: Dependencies

Not applicable for this change.

:link: Contingency Plan

  • Contingency mechanism: Revert the comps change
  • Contingency deadline: Final freeze
  • Blocks release? Yes.

:link: Documentation

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

:link: Release Notes

Fedora Workstation no longer pre-installs the deprecated GNOME X11 session for new installations. Users who wish to add it back can do so by installing the gnome-session-xsession and gnome-classic-session-xsession packages.

Last edited by @amoloney 2024-06-07T22:05:03Z

6 Likes
2

How do you feel about the proposal as written?

  • Strongly in favor
  • In favor, with reservations
  • Neutral
  • Opposed, but could be convinced
  • Strongly opposed
0 voters

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2 Likes
3

Removed f36

4

Has there been a survey done of known cases where Wayland does not work?

In the quality-team meeting today, @kparal pointed out there are several codepaths in GDM’s udev rules which explicitly disable Wayland - “Hi1710 chipsets”, nomodeset without simple framebuffer drivers, “situation where we’re in a guest with a virtual gpu and host passthrough gpu”. There’s also one marked “when there are multiple virtual gpus”, though it looks to me like this one doesn’t actually do anything, and some cases specific to the NVIDIA binary driver which I guess we don’t technically need to worry about in base Fedora (though I know that, practically speaking, we do consider such cases to some extent).

Aside from that, there is also the fallback mechanism where GDM automatically falls back to the X.org session if it’s present and the Wayland session fails. I don’t know if we have any idea how often or in what circumstances that mechanism actually kicks in, but it seems like this would break it.

2 Likes
5

There has not been, though we do need to remove the udev rules that do this because they obviously don’t make sense in the context of this change.

7

another thought here: doesn’t this make the known issues with Orca on Wayland even more of a problem? at least as things stand you can force fallback to X.org to get a working screen reader (I guess). if X is not on the live image, you just can’t.

8

You already kind of can’t as far as I can tell. I don’t see a way to activate GNOME X11 from the live environment because GDM only gives you the session selector with the password field. That never shows up in the live environment because liveuser has no password.

9

This change proposal has now been submitted to FESCo with ticket #3226 for voting.

To find out more, please visit our Changes Policy documentation.

10

My only concern is that a lot of apps are still using xorg compatibility. So this should probably be well communicated so that individual app teams can transition to wayland or instructions provided on how to explicitly enable xorg compatibility otherwise a lot of users will complain.

11

Xwayland is still included, X11 applications will continue to work. This is only about the GNOME X11 session.

5 Likes
12

This change has been accepted by FESCo for Fedora Linux 41. A full list of approved changes to date can be found on the Change Set Page.

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1 Like