No Wayland option for Gnome in F38 and F39

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1

Hello,

I use Fedora 38 and 39 Workstation on two computers and have recently noticed that both use Gnome under X instead of Wayland. The options in the login screen are “Gnome” and “Gnome Classic”.

Both operating systems are more or less stock, I haven’t changed much in either of them.

2

Would you mind sharing your HW details, specifically GPU ?

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3

Can you show the output from ls -lR /usr/share/{wayland-,x}sessions?

Also check if you have the packages gnome-classic-session and gnome-session-wayland-session installed.

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4

See also No longer able to select wayland when logging in

Most of the resolutions are pretty specific to the poster’s situation, but it does offer some useful troubleshooting/investigation advice for essentially the same problem.

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5

It’s a mini PC, Lenovo ThinkCentre M700, with a Core i7 (6th gen, I think) CPU and no separate GPU.

image

6

Yes, both gnome-classic-session and gnome-session-wayland-session are installed.

$ ls -lR /usr/share/{wayland-,x}sessions
/usr/share/wayland-sessions:
total 36
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 8139 Mar 19  2023 gnome-classic.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 7773 Mar 19  2023 gnome-classic-wayland.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 7830 Mar 21  2023 gnome.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 8021 Mar 21  2023 gnome-wayland.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  114 Sep 23 03:00 labwc.desktop

/usr/share/xsessions:
total 32
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 8139 Mar 19  2023 gnome-classic.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 7617 Mar 19  2023 gnome-classic-xorg.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 7830 Mar 21  2023 gnome.desktop
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 7915 Mar 21  2023 gnome-xorg.desktop
7

Some time ago, I installed labwc, a Wayland compositor, from an official Fedora repository. I haven’t changed any of its settings yet, but still thought I should mention this.

I have only tried to run it from the terminal within Gnome. For now, labwc isn’t available as an environment in the login screen of my F38.

8

If I may quote myself from the link above:

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

I think it’s likely that you’ll find GNOME Shell crashing shortly after that line.

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9

There is indeed a long report called by journalctl -b _UID=42. I’ve tried searching for the line above using / but only Running GNOME Shell (using mutter 44.5) as a X11 window and compositing manager has been found. No mentions of Wayland.

10

Then I guess I should quote the rest of that comment:

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

You’re looking for something like WaylandEnable=false that isn’t commented out (#).

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11

Below is /etc/gdm/custom.conf:

# GDM configuration storage

[daemon]
# Uncomment the line below to force the login screen to use Xorg
WaylandEnable=false
DefaultSession=x11

AutomaticLoginEnable=True
AutomaticLogin=user

[security]

[xdmcp]

[chooser]

[debug]
# Uncomment the line below to turn on debugging
#Enable=true

/run/gdm/custom.conf is empty or doesn’t exist.

I wonder why the rule restricting Wayland appeared in /etc/gdm/custom.conf. Should I replace the two lines above with the following two?

WaylandEnable=true
DefaultSession=Wayland
12

I feel like you must have added that at some point. Or at least, I don’t think there’s anything in Fedora that would have done it.

I’d just remove those two lines. For reference, the default [daemon] section looks like this:

[daemon]
# Uncomment the line below to force the login screen to use Xorg
#WaylandEnable=false
13

It’s possible. Many thanks for helping me out!