The Fedora 41 release proposes to transition the Anaconda installer to the Wayland protocol. Currently, Anaconda uses the X11 protocol, which prevents any removal of the dependencies that support X11 from the installation media. Since migrating Anaconda to Wayland is not a trivial task, it is expected that this change will affect the capabilities of the installer.
For example, the remote installation process will need to be redesigned, which currently relies on the TigerVNC client tied to X11. Instead of TigerVNC, the grd (Gnome Remote Desktop) application based on the RDP protocol is proposed. The second notable change will be the revamping of keyboard management processes and layout switching. Currently, Anaconda uses the libXklavier library for keyboard layout configuration, which will no longer be supported in GNOME Shell, and the libxklavier package is intended to be removed from Fedora.
Due to the reliance on libXklavier in the installer used in live builds based on Wayland, the option to switch keyboard layouts is disabled.
Since Wayland does not provide a universal keyboard management mechanism, it has been decided to use the systemd-localed service instead of libXklavier for switching layouts, contacting it via D-Bus.
In addition to migrating the installer to Wayland, it is also proposed to completely cease supplying X11-related GNOME packages in Fedora Workstation builds. Such packages are planned to be left in the repository but will no longer be included in the installation and live media based on GNOME.
The proposal has not yet been approved by the FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), which is responsible for the technical part of the Fedora distribution development. Previously, the committee had already approved the removal of the X11 session for GNOME from the base Fedora 41 release. The main reason for discontinuing X11 support in Fedora is the classification of the X.Org server in RHEL 9 as deprecated and the decision to completely remove it in a significant future release of RHEL 10.
Among the factors contributing to the exclusive support of Wayland is the newly added support for Wayland in proprietary NVIDIA drivers and the replacement of fbdev drivers with the simpledrm driver in Fedora 36, which works correctly with Wayland. The discontinuation of X11 session support will significantly reduce maintenance efforts and free up resources that can be redirected to improving the quality of the modern graphics stack.
Source: opennet.ru
