I’m sure the issue of both whether and when to remove Xorg may be a little controversial. That said, I’d like to share my opinion of this change as a user, and welcome anyone to talk about the issue here if they’d like.
In my honest opinion, I don’t think it is a good idea, not yet anyways. The sole reason for this has to do with Nvidia graphics cards. Nvidia cards currently make up >70% of the GPU market, and from what I’ve seen of using Nvidia on Wayland, it just isn’t an acceptable state for those users. While I’m sure more users in the Linux community are already on AMD and Intel GPU technology, we will still have many new Windows users trying out Linux who will absolutely need to use the Xorg windowing system for the time being. I think we need to wait for a modern and stable open source Nvidia driver to release, or for the Nvidia-maintained one to gain Wayland support. Linux is currently experiencing something of a gaming renaissance, and I’d hate to see gaming users being the ones to suffer from the lack of Nvidia support.
Killing Xorg is basically killing Nvidia GPU compatibility entirely at the moment, so I urge the GNOME and Fedora developers to reconsider dropping Xorg until there are options for Nvidia users on the Wayland window manager.
That said, I definitely recognize the reasoning for the change, and I agree that Wayland is ready to be the defacto option going forward, RIP Xorg. I also recognize that by removing the option, it could be the catalyst necessary to make that driver change happen, and will probably save some disk space, too. Even still, it seems like a risk not worth taking, as high quality, open source Nvidia drivers will probably be available in the next couple years.
I think improvements are always hard. Cutting down X11 is a beginning of a new era. But delaying it won’t be wise. It will hurt for sure, and also will take time till gets full support, but this is how it works. Fedora always been radical, and someone has to do the first step. The true move would be to get official support from Intel to Arc, and AMD, show the way that what we are able to achieve together. Instead of stopping the move, would be more wise to promote the advantages, and just pay it forward. I remember the changes of alsa to pulseaudio, and the curses that we had, then we had pipewire. But we didn’t stopped. Believe or not, Linux will unify, and will be Atomic once Silverblue and flatpacks are reaching the adulthood. Similarly wayland is also similar step, but the problem is not in the box, we users has to adapt, and see if it works or not. Seems to a leap of faith, and everybody said “cannot be done” - but the end you will be there, when you see that the airplain rises to the air. This is why we are Fedora.
The rough edges that are still there will be resolved within the next six months, as KDE 6 will be fully Wayland and no x11 and the System76 Cosmic desktop which is coming in next year will only have wayland. It is important to understand that most NVIDIA customers are server users, not desktop Linux users. Server distros are RHEL, SUSE, and Ubuntu. All of these distros now default to GNOME, so this single move will propagate to the server space very soon. Fedora 40 will be the base for RHEL 10, CentOS Rocky, AlmaLinux, and Oracle Linux, and Ubuntu also uses GNOME, so the next LTS release will not have X11 support. It is clear that this is the right time for NVIDIA to solve the issues, if they want to stay in business.
And try to understand this is hard to tell that x11 will be maintained for next 5years it is only having security fixes and in fully maintenance mode.
And removing support make sence and next years there will be many lts release and many lts will branch of for lts.
It is clear that this is the right time for NVIDIA to solve the issues, if they want to stay in business.
Being devils advocate, NVidia not getting wayland running has no risk of them not saying in business. To say that is just absurd. Even XWayland will continue to exist to bandaid over this.
Sorry, but if we’re going to set our timeline based on factors entirely outside our control, then we will never get rid of X11. So I don’t think NVIDIA should even be a consideration here, because there’s nothing we can do about the situation.
I don’t know what to tell you other than to consider this when making hardware purchase decisions.
Would also like to expand here by saving I was using Wayland on an nvidia desktop for months (I still have it, I just don’t use it) and Wayland is definitely ready for general use.
I agree that it is ready, as I am using it myself, but sometimes my system falls back into Xorg after certain updates. I don’t know what will happen if Xorg as a session isn’t available anymore and this happens again. Will I be locked out of my own system unable to even get into GDM? Will it become completely unresponsive?
A restart is all it takes to put me back in Wayland in this specific case but I still am afraid of potential consequences
Edit: for context, yes, I am using an NVIDIA Optimus device and it works flawlessly when on Wayland, only this issue with Xorg that appears from time to time
Lot of really good points. After considering the arguments, I have to say, I agree. It doesn’t make sense to slow development because one company wants to be stubborn and greedy. Also, the strategic timing coinciding with LTS server releases just might be enough to force Nvidia’s hand, because neglecting Wayland further would mean forcing their customers to use an unmaintained technology because they are too incompetent to take care of their hardware, which would be bad for business. I could see Nvidia them turning it back around very quickly, because they have the resources, just no incentive currently.
Fedora isn’t designed for normal end users. It’s for developers hense why the newest and latest is pushed out as soon as it hits with just enough testing to make sure it doesn’t bork most systems. If you’re a normal desktop user Fedora isn’t for you and probably shouldn’t be considered for usage. Can it be ran as a standard desktop OS? Yes, is it the best for that? No. Just like Arch it’s a bleeding edge testbed for bug fixing an testing new software and most end users shouldn’t be putting themselves through that unless they have a large amount of technical knowledge and are willing to spend a long time troubleshooting.
Use Mint/Debian/Ubuntu or something that doesn’t change much so if you get something working you know it will work for the next 5+ years. Ubuntu 22.04 is supported until 2032 with their free Ubuntu pro subscription and will have xorg + up to date Nvidia drivers until it is EOL. Yes Wayland is no where near ready for the average person (is a large downgrade for creatives and gamers compared to xorg) but most people won’t be affected by this change because distros made for normal end users in mind will still have xorg as an option for the forseeable future.
You have 5-8 years before you will be forced to use Wayland on Nvidia (I doubt distro’s like Debian will ever drop support and patch it back in). If you are just web-browsing or coding you probably won’t have any problems with Wayland (although video playback can be bad on Wayland + Nvidia) but beyond that you should still use Xorg until Nvidia says Wayland + their hardware is in a working state.
Oh my bad. Well the decision to drop Xorg is just hostile to normal end users if Fedora caters to them (it doesn’t mention being aimed at end users on the landing page anywhere?) and doesn’t benefit them what so ever until Wayland is at least at parity with Xorg across all major vendors. I know you can’t do much about Nviida but it is what it is and Xorg should be supported until Wayland works with their hardware at least as well as Xorg does.
What this “lack of feature parity” argument usually fails to mention is the plethora of usability and security issues Xorg has that Wayland fixes. There are cases where Wayland doesn’t work yet, but those are usually cases where Xorg doesn’t do quite well either (color management, VR and VRR being unfortunate examples).
Xorg is dead and trying to drag its corpse for longer will just stagger development.
I would also encourage you to not spread FUD like this. As has been pointed out on this lightly and the main thread this probably should have been on, Wayland is ready for the average user.
I’ve lost count of the amount of actual average users who use Wayland by mistake not even realizing they were, or trying out Wayland to see if FUD similar to what you’ve said is true; and reacted with “well it just works the same as Xorg”.
It’s not perfect, but as someone that does all the things you claim don’t work and is a “large downgrade” regularly, that’s just not true. And yes, my desktop has an nvidia gpu.
Also, even if they meant hybrid graphics, my hardware has hybrid graphics with NVIDIA and Wayland has worked way better for me ever since I was first able to use it in F36. That’s a whopping 2 years now.
Ok then it’s a developer platform and not for end users. It’s not the end users problem that developement for wayland means Xorg isn’t at feature parity for Nvidia users and their experience should not be lessened because developers want to move away from xorg. It’s not the end users problem and shouldn’t be forced onto them under the pretense that they will complain to Nvidia or something (I see no other reason why it would be forced upon a Nvidia end user)? If simple things like video play back is still terrible for Nvidia users (in my experience is as it still stutters on my machine on firefox, youtube, rtx 3070, wayland and doesn’t under Xorg, and another machine using Fedora 38 + GTX 970 using Wayland stutters) then no non technical user will care about security benefits, they will simply uninstall Fedora and move somewhere else.
And they are free to do so if their experience is subpar.
There are other distros that cater to the whims of NVIDIA and their development pace, but Fedora is focused on free and open source software through and through. This is the main reason why we don’t even ship the NVIDIA proprietary drivers by default. Once nvidia-open matures enough and they dedicated to maintaining an open driver, who knows?
Until then, there are other distros that will cater to those who need NVIDIA more than us and we are aware of that. We do what we can to make sure that if you use NVIDIA you will have as good of an experience as we can possibly deliver, but we shouldn’t let them drag the project down.
Pycharm out of the repos has a 3 second lag on text input. Youtube stutters on the base firefox install, any game has a noticable input lag. Creatives complain all the time that colors calibration is very poor in Wayland. I fail to see what use-case Nvidia + Wayland is better or even equal to Xorg + Nvidia
