In the latest development surrounding the release of Fedora Linux 43, it has been announced that packages used in GNOME to function on top of the X-server will be removed from Project repositories. Users of GNOME who currently utilize X11 are encouraged to transition to the GNOME session based on Wayland. However, it is important to note that this proposal is pending approval from the Fesco Committee (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), which is responsible for the technical aspects of Fedora’s distribution development. For more information, click here.
Prior to this decision, in Fedora 41, components necessary for X11 usage in GNOME, as well as the X11 session for GNOME, were removed from the Installation and Live images of the Fedora workstation, although they remained available for installation from the repository. Additionally, X.org Server and related components are being phased out in the final testing stages of Rhel 10. For more details on these changes, visit here.
The primary reason behind this shift is the GNOME project’s efforts to eliminate X11 support. It has been observed that the X11 session in GNOME is not actively developed or tested, resulting in unaddressed errors. Recent proposals in GNOME 48 suggest constructing GNOME-SESSION, GDM, Gnome Shell, and Mutter without X11 support. This aligns with GNOME’s initiative to designate X11 as an optional dependency over the past three years. Click here for further information.
In the upcoming GNOME 49 release, there are plans to disallow the assembly of GNOME with X11 support by default. By GNOME 50, the intention is to completely remove the code necessary for X11-based sessions from GNOME. Recognizing the imminent end of X11 support by GNOME, Fedora proposes to expedite the removal of X11 GNOME components from their distribution six months ahead of GNOME 50, rather than prolonging the process. To read more about this decision, click here.
Several factors facilitate the shift towards exclusive Wayland support, including the integration of Wayland support in NVIDIA Proprietary Drivers and