FESCO Committee (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), responsible for the technical development of the Fedora Linux distribution, has decided to remove the packet gnome-session-xission, which is responsible for launching the Gnome session based on the X-server. This change is planned for the release of Fedora 41 in the fall. In Fedora Workstation 41, only the Wayland session will remain by default, but X11 session packages can still be installed from repositories.
The Gnome-Session-XSSISSION package is marked as outdated, indicating that Gnome developers intend to stop supporting X11 in the future.
One of the planned tasks includes dividing the package gnome-classic-sessionia, which provides extensions and settings for Gnome Shell to recreate a classic gnome session. The Gnome-Classic-Session package will be installed by default, with X11 code now being allocated in a separate package called GNOME-CLASSIC-SESSION-X11, mainly providing support for Wayland sessions.
Earlier, the FESCO committee approved the termination of KDE session support on X11 basis in Fedora 40, in line with the transition to KDE 6 branch, which defaults to Wayland Protocol. To run X11 applications in a Wayland-based environment, XWayland support is provided.
The main reason for the cessation of X11 sessions in Fedora is the classification of X.org server as obsolete in RHEL 9, with plans to completely remove it in the future, possibly by RHEL 10. Other factors include the emergence of Wayland support in NVIDIA Proprietary Drivers and FBDEV drivers in Fedora 36 on the Simpledrm driver, which works well with Wayland. Ending X11 session support will reduce labor costs and free up resources to enhance the modern graphic stack’s performance.