Following a lot of work in this direction toward the end goal of removing GNOME X11 support, this milestone may finally be acheived for the Fedora 43 cycle due out by the end of the year. A change proposal has been filed for removing the GNOME X11 packages in the repository and in turn making the GNOME desktop Wayland-only on Fedora Linux.
Fedora developer Neal Gompa has filed the change proposal for Wayland-only GNOME with Fedora 43. All users of the GNOME X11 session would need to migrate to the GNOME Wayland session with the GNOME X11 packages to be removed, assuming all comes to pass.
The change proposal still needs to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but this has been a long-sought goal for the developers involved. Considering the maturity of the GNOME Wayland session at this point, features like HDR only being supported under Wayland, and the lack of X11/X.Org Server maintenance, seeing this come to fruition for Fedora 43 wouldn’t be the least bit surprising.
The change proposal notes:
“As part of the upstream effort to remove X11 support from GNOME, Fedora will no longer include the GNOME X11 packages. The GNOME X11 session receives virtually no testing and little to no development.
There has been active effort upstream for several years now to close out the remaining user experience blockers to dropping the X11 session code, and that work completed with GNOME 48. The upstream target is to drop it for GNOME 50, with it being disabled by default at compile time for GNOME 49.
This Change effectively implements the GNOME 50 target in GNOME 49 because there is no one to support any issues with GNOME X11 upstream. The X11 session is already quite buggy, with serious unfixed issues in Mutter (like rhbz#2179566 and glgo#GNOME/mutter#3868) and recently Phoronix could not benchmark GNOME X11 vs Wayland because “GNOME on X11 wasn’t even working due to bugs”.
Dropping the GNOME X11 session now allows us to reconcile with reality that the GNOME X11 session is simply not supported anymore (either by us or upstream GNOME).”
By GNOME 50 next year upstream could completely remove its X11 session support.
