Fedora 41 will drop GNOME's X11 session

pagure.io Issue #414: no longer install gnome xorg sessions by default - fedora-workstation - Pagure.io

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Nvidia users: Chuckles I'm in Danger
- I tried Gnome with Wayland and an Nvidia card just yesterday, it worked fine so far with the proprietary drivers. NixOS not Fedora though.
  
  I use Wayland on NixOS too and everything works fine except slight flickering in games.
  I think it'll be fixed soon though and I can fully move to Wayland.
- Can confirm. Wayland with new nvidia GPU is currently unusable even with the proprietary drivers. F39
  
  I am currently in F39 Wayland with proprietary nVidia drivers and I have not experienced any issues. (Laptop Quadro P3200)
  Edit: this was a useless comment. OP specified new, my laptop is an old boy.
- If it's not usable they just won't use it.
- I though Nvidia was getting better
  
  It’s horrible. My laptop with hybrid graphics works ok except for a brief flicker every time it wakes from sleep. It’s not a big deal. My desktop with dedicated nvidia is a hot mess - constant flickering. Steam is borderline non-functional and there are all kinds of graphical glitches on the desktop. I’m stuck with X11 on that machine.
- @redcalcium @e8d79 The noVideo experience on Linux dramatically improved, especially with the latest driver versions and modern DIVORCE GPUs. We also kinda have to accept the death of X11
  
  I sure hope so. Just the other day I updated to nvidia v550. Got a blank tty screen right after login to gnome/wayland. Rebooted the computer and login to gnome/x11, no issue. Logout and relogin to gnome/wayland, somehow no issue anymore. I guess this kind of random issues will persist until one day Nvidia decides to play nice with Wayland.

I think this is fair. Part of the ethos of Fedora is being a forward-thinking distro that spearheads new solutions.
And Gnome's been pretty great on Wayland for a long time now anyway.
Besides, adding support back is as simple as adding a repo. If you want to enable X11 again, it's a trivial task.
E: apparently not even adding a repo, it's in the base repositories.
- Wayland isn't all that new anymore anyway.
  AFAIK they already defaulted to Wayland years ago, and a few years that I've used it on my work PC I had no problems.
  
  Wayland is nearly 20 years old...
  
  Yeah like 2017 or something (Nvidia excluded!)

Being the first major distro to force the adoption of new technologies is kinda Fedora's whole thing, so it's not really surprising. It's annoying for people on Fedora who use features Wayland doesn't have yet, but they can jump through a few hoops to get X11 back, or better yet switch to a distro that cares more about giving users options than they do about beta testing new technologies for their corporate overlords.
Still, somebody has be first, and it's past time to get serious about this whole transition, so I can hardly try to claim this is a bad thing.
- Fedora is life

I would support this, but Wayland always lacks support for remote. I have to switch to x11 if I want to work on it via teamviewer (past) or rustdesk (present).
- I just tested freerdp on gnome wayland and it works (via Settings -> Sharing -> Remote Desktop). Combined with tailscale/zerotier, you should be able to remote from anywhere via RDP.
  
  It cannot be used to log in, potentially can’t even unlock but I haven’t used it in a while (Edit: confirmed it cannot connect if locked). A reboot preventing access until I go back to the local console is not fun.
  I realize for their rustdesk example it’s not really different iirc, but there are solutions for x11.
- You can use the built in remote access tool. Also Rustdesk does have some support but it is getting better slowly.
- ironically that's literally what x11 is made for.

So basically what KDE has done with Plasma 6 onwards. Wayland is standard, but you can still use X11 if required.
An understandable decision. At some point you have to start switching to Wayland.
- Not exactly the same.
  Plasma 6 still installs the X11 session. This change will make it so the Gnome X11 session is not getting installed by deafult, so you need to install it yourself if you need it. In Plasma 6, you just change to the X11 session in your Display Manager.
  
  Fedora KDE 40 does not have an X11 session by default

On my RTX 3080 laptop I get a significantly lower frame rate on my laptop screen (240hz) and 4k external monitor (144hz) when using Wayland. Wayland has come a long way but I'm still going to be using X11 for at least the near future.
- Yeah I feel you. Nvidia drivers need to catch up

I use an old Apple Cinema display with fedora and it only works at full resolution with Xorg..

I think this makes sense. I still need X11 for VR because GNOME still doesn't have display leasing on Wayland but once that gets implemented I won't be using X11 anymore. I think most people don't need X11 anymore either. For people like me who still need it for specific things, it can just be installed again manually.

52 comments