Merged yesterday to the GNOME Display Manager “GDM” codebase is disabling of the X11/X.Org session by default as the first step toward deprecating GNOME’s X11 session support.
This two month old merge request has now been merged to GDM for the current GNOME 49 cycle:
“This is the first step towards deprecating the x11 session.
X11 has been receiving less and less testing. We have been defaulting to the wayland session since 2016 and it’s about time we disable, and eventually drop the x11 session completely.”
The plan has been to remove the GNOME X11 session support for GNOME 50 though there has been talk too about removing it early with the current GNOME 49 release due out in September. Fedora 43 notably is already preparing for Wayland-only GNOME.
From the GDM side one open matter has been about preserving X11 session support for other (non-GNOME) desktops that may be using the GDM display/log-in manager. Developers like at Canonical/Ubuntu are interested in seeing GDM preserve its ability to launch other X11 desktops. Jordan Petridis who authored the GDM merge request commented on the ticket yesterday:
“[In my opinion] if we are going to keep the x11 session launcher and have that by 49, we could also merge the default change [at the moment] and then fix it enough so it works, since there are extra changes needed anyway. That or we merge and revert as needed before the release.
…
As discussed with Adrian yesterday, this is indeed the plan. We can go ahead and switch defaults to False to start testing things. The x11 session launch functionality is likely to make a comeback before 49.rc and if that does not end up being the case we will reevaluate and might revert the defaults back to True.”
For the moment this X11 session support in GDM can be restored by editing the GDM configuration file (gdm.conf) and uncommenting the line for XorgEnable=true.
