How do I make a Fedora installation 100% Wayland only? (KDE)

Fedora 43 released its first wayland-only distro (Gnome). Wondering why not KDE?

After migration to wayland some 2 yrs ago all horrible linux GUI issues seem to be left in the past (now scaling works fine, fonts are crisp enough, etc).

Question: how i can make my system wayland-only? Disabling (and eventually removing) X11 legacy completely, as it also improves security?

There’s an interesting discussion on this on Phoronix: How do I disable xwayland and x11 in fedora to see whats already futureproof software. I don’t like security holes in my desktop computer

You could theoretically remove the package that contains the Xwayland binary, however this might remove other packages due to dependencies.

You could delete the installed binary, usually /usr/bin/Xwayland unexecutable, or make it unexecutable, but that might lead to issues for your Wayland compositor when it tries to use it.

Best way is probably to make the X11 Unix server socket unusable by removing access rights.
The socket usually looks like a file, e.g. /tmp/.X11-unix/X0

Any X11 application will try to “open” it at startup and fail if it can’t.
Consequently the Wayland compositor will never get a request and will never try to start Xwayland.

Is this the best known method?

By default KDE in Fedora does not include the X11 support.

Both Gnome and KDE Plasma require XWayland for support for legacy X11 apps.
But its not exposed to you network.

1 Like

Yep, KDE runs wayland, but If i get it right there’s still possibility to run legacy X11 applications (while gnome disabled it completely).

If it is correct, then how do I disable/remove X11 compatibility completely?

Where did you get this from? Xwayland is still very much included and will be for decades to come.

Funfact: Fedora KDE is wayland-only since F40.

1 Like

No it did not.

1 Like

that’s the impression I got from the news articles.
thanks for the clarification!

anyway, if one wants to disable running X11 apps completely, are the steps mentioned above, the right ones?

I think this is a good question to ask over at https://discuss.kde.org/ where the KDE developers hang out.

Maybe there is a supported way to avoid Xwayland being started.
I just tried to kill the Xwayland process and to restarted.

1 Like