Fedora has been leading the way when it comes to Wayland adoption on Linux systems, well before any other major distribution went down that path. It was the first to ship with Wayland by default on GNOME, setting the stage for what will hopefully become the future of the Linux desktop.

With each new release, Fedora has doubled down on this approach, continuously polishing the experience, contributing upstream to GNOME, and pushing for broader Wayland adoption across the Linux ecosystem.

A recently closed issue sees them carry out a major change for the GNOME-equipped Fedora Workstation.

What’s Happening: As part of the upcoming Fedora 43 release, Workstation will no longer feature an X11 session, defaulting to a Wayland-only policy, with all X11 packages being removed from the new release that is set to come equipped with GNOME 49.

Fastfetch output of Fedora Workstation 41 Wayland session.

The change proposal was pitched by Neal Gompa of the FESCo, who mentioned that:

Fedora Workstation has a long history of developing and promoting the Wayland experience for GNOME, and it has been the primary experience for all users (including those with NVIDIA cards) since Fedora Linux 36.

This continuation of the work in Fedora Linux 41 to drop the X11 session from the media reaffirms our commitment to the Wayland GNOME experience in furtherance of the goal to provide the highest quality GNOME experience through Fedora Workstation.

What to Expect: For starters, all GNOME X11 components will be removed from Fedora Workstation. As a result, the GNOME X11 session will no longer be available, and existing users will be automatically switched to the Wayland session.

Those who prefer using X11 will have to either switch to using a different login manager and desktop environment combo that supports X11 or move to Fedora Spins such as Xfce, Cinnamon, or MATE, which will continue to offer X11 sessions.

Plus, it’s only a matter of time before GNOME drops X11 completely. GNOME 50 is already targeting this change, having removed X11 session targets, with the full removal of X11 session code panned next.

That said, Wayland’s come a long way, but it still has some rough edges that can cause issues with certain apps and tools, disrupting a user’s desktop experience.

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