Fedora 43 GNOME desktop to remove support for X11 sessions

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has decided to approve a change in Fedora 43 that will see the GNOME desktop become Wayland-only. The proposal was posted to Fedora Pagure two weeks ago and the FESCo voted to approve the change on Tuesday.

The decision will see users on X11 moved to Wayland and X11 packages will be taken out of the Fedora repositories. As a bit of history, Fedora 25 was the first version to be released with Wayland as the default display server protocol and that came out all the way back in November 2016 - 9 years ago!

Since then, Canonical has also switched Ubuntu over to Wayland, so by now, it’s quite a mature technology that most works as users expect. It offers more modern features and it is more secure than X11.

According to Phoronix, the Fedora project’s decision aligns with what’s going on over at the GNOME project. It’s expected that GNOME 50 will drop its support for X11 sessions and it could even be moved forward to GNOME 49 if there is consensus.

Phoronix also points out that the decision made by Fedora to remove X11 session support will not impact XWayland, which lets you run X11 clients from within the GNOME Wayland session. This will be welcome news to people still running any apps that have not yet been updated to support GNOME Wayland.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of April): 1,811

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend