In the upcoming Fedora Linux 43 release, scheduled for October, it is planned to remove from the project's repositories the packages used in GNOME for operations on top of the X server. All GNOME users who utilized X11 are encouraged to switch forcibly to a Wayland-based GNOME session. This proposal has yet to be approved by the FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), which is responsible for the technical aspects of Fedora's development.
Previously, in the Fedora 41 release, components for using X11 in GNOME, as well as the X11 session for GNOME, were excluded from the installation and Live media of Fedora Workstation, but they could still be installed from the repository. The supply of the X.org Server and its associated components has also been discontinued in the RHEL 10 distribution, which is currently in the final testing stage.
The key motivation for this change is the effort to rid the project of X11 support, undertaken by the GNOME project. It is noted that the X11 session in GNOME is practically no longer developed or tested, and related X11 bugs remain unaddressed. In the recent GNOME 48 release, changes were proposed to enable the building of gnome-session, GDM, GNOME Shell, and Mutter without X11 support. This option wraps up a three-year initiative by GNOME to make X11 an optional dependency.
In the autumn GNOME 49 release, it is planned to disable building GNOME with X11 support by default, and in a year, with the GNOME 50 release, they intend to completely remove the code for X11-based sessions from GNOME. Since X11 support will inevitably cease in GNOME, it has been proposed in Fedora to expedite this process by removing the X11 components from GNOME in the distribution six months earlier, without waiting for the GNOME 50 release.
Among the reasons favoring the retention of only Wayland support is the appearance of Wayland support in proprietary NVIDIA drivers and the resolution of Wayland-specific issues within the distribution itself, such as fbdev being used by the simpledrm driver that works correctly with Wayland. The cessation of support for X11 sessions will significantly reduce the maintenance workload and free up resources that can be redirected toward improving the quality of the modern graphics stack.
Source: opennet.ru
