No longer able to select wayland when logging in

I normally use X11, but with the discussion concerning the pending removal of X11 I wanted to start working with wayland to see if it will meet all my needs.

I use workstation with gnome, and just upgraded from F38 to F39 Beta.

I am used to the selection of DEs to be Gnome, Gnome Classic, (both wayland) and Gnome with xorg, Gnome Classic with xorg.

Now I only see selections for Gnome, and Gnome Classic – both of which log me into X11.

I have checked the files with

# ls -l /usr/share/{wayland-,x}sessions/
/usr/share/wayland-sessions/:
total 32
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 8139 Sep 15 19:00 gnome-classic.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 7955 Sep 15 19:00 gnome-classic-wayland.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 7830 Sep 18 19:00 gnome.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 8135 Sep 18 19:00 gnome-wayland.desktop

/usr/share/xsessions/:
total 32
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 8139 Sep 15 19:00 gnome-classic.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 7773 Sep 15 19:00 gnome-classic-xorg.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 7830 Sep 18 19:00 gnome.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 7915 Sep 18 19:00 gnome-xorg.desktop

and removed those files then did a reinstall of the 3 packages that provide those files to ensure they are all up to date, but still only get the 2 DE options and it always connects to xorg and I cannot connect to a wayland DE.

Can anyone provide the means to enable wayland logins. Note that this only occurred when I upgraded from F38 to F39.

I have an additional system that was newly installed with F38 then upgraded to F39 and it shows the same symptoms. Both are desktop machines, and both were previously used exclusively with xorg. Both also have nvidia GPUs.

You can check the journal to see if GDM is attempting to use a Wayland greeter:

journalctl -b _UID=42

Look for a line similar to:

Running GNOME Shell (using mutter 44.5) as a Wayland display server

If not, check /etc/gdm/custom.conf and /run/gdm/custom.conf for any configuration directives disabling Wayland. The latter is written to from a udev rule for certain hardware configurations: /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules

1 Like

Thank you very much.
On one system I had removed xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-power since I wanted it to not give me the error message on boot about nvidia-powerd failing. This caused the udev rule you noted to disable wayland in /run/gdm/custom.conf

On the other system I apparently had disabled wayland myself in the /etc/gdm/custom.conf file.

After fixing both of my self-caused errors I am now able to use either wayland or xorg on both systems.

Again, thanks for the pointers. :+1: