The FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), responsible for the technical part of the Fedora Linux distribution's development, has approved the removal of the gnome-session-xsession package, which is responsible for launching GNOME sessions based on the X server. This change is scheduled for release in Fedora 41, which will be built this fall. Among the default sessions supported in Fedora Workstation 41, only Wayland will remain, but the packages for setting up X11 sessions will still be available for installation from repositories. The gnome-session-xsession package is marked as deprecated, and the GNOME developers plan to discontinue support for X11 in the future.
Among the planned tasks, there is also a mention of separating the gnome-classic-session package, which includes extensions and settings for GNOME Shell to recreate a classic session in the style of GNOME 2. The gnome-classic-session package will continue to be installed by default, but the code for supporting X11 has now been split into a separate package gnome-classic-session-x11, leaving only Wayland session support in the main package.
Earlier, FESCo approved the end of X11 session support for KDE in Fedora 40. This decision was made due to the transition to the KDE 6 branch, which defaults to a session using the Wayland protocol, while operation using X11 has been moved to the options category. For launching X11 applications in Wayland-based environments, Xwayland support continues.
The primary reason for discontinuing X11 session support in Fedora is the transition of the X.Org server to the deprecated category in RHEL 9, with a decision to completely remove it in a future major release of RHEL 10. Factors contributing to the retention of only Wayland support also include the introduction of Wayland support in proprietary NVIDIA drivers and the replacement of fbdev drivers with the simpledrm driver in Fedora 36, which works correctly with Wayland. Discontinuing X11 session support will significantly reduce maintenance efforts and free up resources that can be directed toward improving the quality of the modern graphics stack.
Source: opennet.ru
