Tryging to run F41 on old machine with ATI Radeon 5000 - black screen

[ckpiv (Charles P.)]

I installed Fedora 41 on an old Mac Pro (2013) with AMD Fire Pro 300’s and continued to get a black screen. I needed to use the amdgpu drivers and a got them all set in grub but still had the black screen issue. came across this thread:

After upgrading to F41, black screen instead of login screen if using Wayland

Hello everyone. I see that there are several topics similar to this one. However, as far as I have seen, they are all related to Nvidia drivers, which I don’t use. My first Fedora release was F40 with GNOME. I had to tinker a bit with the Nvidia drivers, as I currently have a really old card - a GeForce 210, from 2009. Eventually, after several kernel updates, I was able to ditch Nvidia’s proprietary drivers and get F40/GNOME working with both Wayland and Nouveau drivers. Performance was excell…

I set my system to use xorg and it booted into the gui. I ssh into the Mac Pro to make the changes then rebooted. Apparently from what I have gathered there is a issue with gdm / wayland support on some old hardware. Did not have this issue up to F39.

This is what I did:

Open /etc/gdm/custom.conf.
Uncomment the line WaylandEnable=false.
Right after that, add DefaultSession=gnome-xorg.desktop.

This brings back the login screen and lets me log into the desktop normally.

The clue for me was that I was able to ssh into the Mac Pro, so it was booted up but gdm running under wayland was failing before the gui could be loaded.