Fedora change proposal would remove the X11 GNOME session from Fedora 43

I’m sure this won’t make anybody mad, and we can all have a reasonable discussion about this. A change proposal for Fedora suggests Fedora should drop the X11 GNOME session from Fedora 43, moving GNOME’s target of removing X11 in GNOME 50 to the Fedora release carrying GNOME 49. Fedora 43 will be released in roughly six months.

The reasoning behind the proposal should be no surprise.

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).
↫ Fedora change proposal

If you’re still using legacy X11 on Fedora GNOME for some reason, upgrading to Fedora 43 would mean being moved to Wayland. If you would want to continue using X11, you’d need to install a different login manager than GDM, and a desktop environment that still supports X11 (like Cinnamon or Xfce). Since all of this is the plan anyway, what this proposal effectively does is move the removal of X11 from Fedora GNOME ahead by six months. Do note that this is only a change proposal for now, and it will have to be voted on and agreed upon before it becomes official policy.

This is just yet another nail in the coffin of X11 on Linux, as more and more distributions and desktop environments move to eliminate it entirely from their installations and stacks in favour of Wayland. Big concerns here for some X11 users are definitely accessibility, where tools are still relatively young, and to a lesser degree NVIDIA users, whose GPU drivers are a bit of a mess when it comes to Wayland. To this day, NVIDIA with Wayland can be very hit or miss.

Regardless, we all know which way the wind’s blowing.