F43 Change Proposal: Wayland-only GNOME (self-contained)

Project Discussion Change Proposals
, ,
1

Wayland-only GNOME

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.

Wiki
Announced

:link: Summary

Remove the GNOME X11 packages from the Fedora repositories. All users of the GNOME X11 session will be migrated to the GNOME Wayland session.

:link: Owner

:link: Detailed Description

As part of the upstream effort to remove X11 support from GNOME, Fedora will no longer include the GNOME X11 packages. The GNOME X11 session receives virtually no testing and little to no development.

There has been active effort upstream for several years now to close out the remaining user experience blockers to dropping the X11 session code, and that work completed with GNOME 48. The upstream target is to drop it for GNOME 50, with it being disabled by default at compile time for GNOME 49.

This Change effectively implements the GNOME 50 target in GNOME 49 because there is no one to support any issues with GNOME X11 upstream. The X11 session is already quite buggy, with serious unfixed issues in Mutter (like rhbz#2179566 and glgo#GNOME/mutter#3868) and recently Phoronix could not benchmark GNOME X11 vs Wayland because ā€œGNOME on X11 wasnā€™t even working due to bugsā€.

Dropping the GNOME X11 now allows us to reconcile with reality that the GNOME X11 session is simply not supported anymore (either by us or upstream GNOME).

:link: Feedback

:link: Benefit to Fedora

This aligns us with the effort going on upstream to retire the GNOME X11 session. It also 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 continuation of the work in Fedora Linux 41 to drop the X11 session from the media 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 and have the Wayland versions obsolete them

  • 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 using the X11 session will be automatically transitioned to the GNOME Wayland session. GDM will no longer support launching X11 sessions. Users of X11 will need to select another login manager and desktop environment that continues to offer X11 (such as LightDM with Cinnamon or MATE).

:link: Early Testing (Optional)

Not applicable to this change.

:link: How To Test

For users with GNOME X11 installed and have it selected, uninstall gnome-session-xsession and gnome-classic-session-xsession packages and reboot to see GDM automatically switch you to GNOME Wayland.

:link: User Experience

Users will no longer have the ā€œGNOME on Xorgā€ session as an option for the GNOME desktop.

:link: Dependencies

Not applicable for this change.

:link: Contingency Plan

  • Contingency mechanism: Restore the GNOME X11 packages and re-enable GDMā€™s X11 support.
  • Contingency deadline: Final freeze
  • Blocks release? Yes.

:link: Documentation

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

:link: Release Notes

The GNOME X11 session has been removed from Fedora Linux. Users previously using GNOME on X11 will be transparently upgraded to the GNOME Wayland session. X11 applications are still supported on GNOME.

Last edited by @ngompa 2025-04-23T20:32:14Z

Last edited by @ngompa 2025-04-23T20:32:14Z

1 Like
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

If you are in favor but have reservations, or are opposed but something could change your mind, please explain in a reply.

We want everyone to be heard, but many posts repeating the same thing actually makes that harder. If you have something new to say, please say it. If, instead, you find someone has already covered what youā€™d like to express, please simply give that post a :heart: instead of reiterating. You can even do this by email, by replying with the heart emoji or just ā€œ+1ā€. This will make long topics easier to follow.

Please note that this is an advisory ā€œstraw pollā€ meant to gauge sentiment. It isnā€™t a vote or a scientific survey. See About the Change Proposals category for more about the Change Process and moderation policy.

3

Two nit-picks for clarity:

The session is called ā€œGNOME on Xorgā€ in the UI (defined in the xsession file), not ā€œGNOME X11ā€.

Also, ā€œthe GNOME X11 packagesā€ is a bit confusing. Maybe ā€œthe packages providing the ā€˜GNOME on Xorgā€™ sessionā€ would be better?

1 Like
4

Yes, the consequences of this proposals are not clear. Is this just the GNOME Session and mutter, or libraries as well? I am very happy using i3, but my e-mail application is Evolution, and I use Gnumeric for spreadsheets. These rely on both GNOME and Gtk+ libraries.

5

This only affects GNOME Shell, GNOME Session, Mutter, and GDM. Everything else is left alone.

1 Like
6

Weā€™ll see a lot more of these kinds of posts if the other spins are not ready for Wayland yet:

7

Those spins can provide their own Xorg dependencies?

8

If this change goes through they would probably have to switch to a different DM if they want to continue using X11. But the user might have to know to make that change if it isnā€™t a fresh install.

9

We can have a writeup for telling people how to switch to either SDDM or LightDM for GDM users. Itā€™s fairly straightforward:

For SDDM:

$ sudo dnf install sddm
$ sudo systemctl enable --force sddm.service

For LightDM:

$ sudo dnf install lightdm lightdm-gtk
$ sudo systemctl enable --force lightdm.service
1 Like
10

Removing Xorg sessions is counter to the second goal. The highest quality GNOME experience for me was Xorg for a 1000Hz mouse from 2016 until at least F41/GNOME 47 (Iā€™m giving GNOME 48 Wayland a go now though so maybe 9 years might be it :stuck_out_tongue: ).

If that was excusable all that time, who exactly is defining a high quality experience?

Iā€™ve not experienced any issue with GNOME 48 on Xorg on F42 (particularly not those two reports), and considering I was running it real-time and know it worked, Iā€™m assuming Phoronix was doing something odd.

Iā€™ve used every GNOME and tried Xorg and Wayland Intel/AMD/NV and HiDPI and had far less issue on Xorg sessions; I donā€™t buy claims of it being more buggy.

Iā€™m not necessarily against Xorg being dropped from a maintenance burden standpoint and the futureā„¢, Iā€™m just not a fan of years of exaggerated hype of Wayland as a reason to drop it and it feels disingenuous.

11

For GNOMEā€™s Wayland experience, thatā€™s the GNOME developers upstream. The main advantage of Wayland is allowing them to more fully express their desire for an opinionated desktop environment. Every Wayland environment can choose the range of capabilities they want to support.

Fundamentally, whatā€™s happening here is that every desktopā€™s X11 session is suffering from various degrees of bitrot. KDE Plasma and GNOME have a higher rate of it than say MATE does because KDE Plasma and GNOME have fully moved development over to their Wayland-based environments, but they are all suffering from it because the standalone X11 server is unable to incorporate features and capabilities for new classes of hardware (new input device types, new types of displays, etc.)

1 Like
12

Stop fighting, letā€™s keep this very real:

Fedora hates X11, if you rely on X11 just migrate, because this is going to happen, sooner or later.

13

There is no hatredā€¦ itā€™s just that interest and work has moved on to
wayland, so X11 is sailing slowly off into the sunset.

I wish it well, it did great things.

1 Like
15

Could we have lists of components affected by this change added once itā€™s clear? Eg. all the packages that are changed not to support X11 by patches/build flags, etc.

16

Sure. So far, Iā€™ve identified the source packages affected as such:

  • mutter (Set at build time -Dx11=false)
  • gdm (Set at build time -Dx11=false)
  • gnome-shell (Rebuild after mutter to disable X11)
  • gnome-session (Set at build time -Dx11=false, have -xsession subpackage obsoleted by -wayland-session)
  • gnome-shell-extensions (Apply submitted patch, set at build time -Dx11=false, have -xsession subpackage obsoleted by -wayland-session)

I believe this is the final list, but Iā€™m checking things over to be sure.