In the Fedora release Linux 43, scheduled for October, plans to remove packages used by GNOME to run on top of the X server from the project's repositories. All GNOME users who were using X11 are being asked to switch to a Wayland-based GNOME session. This proposal has not yet been approved by FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), the technical body responsible for the development of the Fedora distribution.
Previously, in Fedora 41, the components for using X11 in GNOME, as well as the X11 session for GNOME, were removed from the Fedora Workstation installation and Live media, but could be installed from the repository. X.org Server and related components have also been discontinued in the RHEL 10 distribution, which is in final testing.
The key reason for the change is the work being done by the GNOME project to remove X11 support. It is noted that the X11 session in GNOME is practically not being developed or tested, and X11-related errors remain unfixed. The recent GNOME 48 release proposed changes that would allow gnome-session, GDM, GNOME Shell, and Mutter to be built without X11 support. This feature summed up the GNOME initiative to make X11 optional over the past three years.
In the fall release of GNOME 49, they plan to disable the GNOME build with X11 support by default, and in a year's time, in the release of GNOME 50, they intend to completely remove the code for the X11-based session from GNOME. Since GNOME will inevitably stop supporting X11, Fedora has proposed not to delay this process, but to remove the GNOME components of X11 in the distribution six months earlier, without waiting for the release of GNOME 50.
Among the reasons for leaving only Wayland support, one can note the appearance of Wayland support in NVIDIA proprietary drivers and the solution of Wayland-specific problems in the distribution itself, for example, fbdev used the simpledrm driver, which works correctly with Wayland. Stopping support for the X11 session will significantly reduce labor costs for maintenance and free up resources that can be directed to improving the quality of the modern graphics stack.
Source: opennet.ru
