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Open Source GNOME Linux

Fedora Workstation 41 To No Longer Install GNOME X.Org Session By Default (phoronix.com) 75

Posted by BeauHD from the long-live-Wayland dept.
Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: Fedora Workstation has long defaulted to using GNOME's Wayland session by default, but it has continued to install the GNOME X.Org session for fallback purposes or those opting to use it instead. But for the Fedora Workstation 41 release later in the year, there is a newly-approved plan to no longer have that GNOME X.Org session installed by default. Recently there was a Fedora Workstation ticket opened to no longer install the GNOME X.Org session by default. This is just about whether the X.Org session is pre-installed but would continue to live in the repository for those wanting to explicitly install it.

The Fedora Workstation working group decided to go ahead with this change for the Fedora 41 cycle, not the upcoming Fedora 40 release. So pending any obstacles by FESCo, which is unlikely. Fedora Workstation 41 will not be installing the GNOME X.Org session by default. Long live Wayland.
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Fedora Workstation 41 To No Longer Install GNOME X.Org Session By Default More

Fedora Workstation 41 To No Longer Install GNOME X.Org Session By Default

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  • That's OK (Score:4, Funny)

    by sonamchauhan ( 587356 ) <sonamc@PARISgmail.com minus city> on Thursday March 07, 2024 @08:44PM (#64298625) Journal

    Linux users no longer install Fedora workstation by default.

    • Re:That's OK (Score:5, Informative)

      by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Friday March 08, 2024 @12:54AM (#64299015)

      >"Linux users no longer install Fedora workstation by default."

      Yep, beat me to it.

      I left Fedora a long time ago (and now leaving RedHat anything as well)
      I left Gnome when it was destroyed a long time ago.
      And I have no intention of leaving X anytime soon.

      Mint + X + native/real packages + Cinnamon or MATE or KDE/Plasma or XFCE = happiness for me. And if the Ubuntu base gets too crazy/stupid/restrictive/insane (and they have been leaning that way more than once), Mint DE ( LMDE, direct Debian base) is waiting in the wings...

      https://www.linuxmint.com/down... [linuxmint.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        And I have no intention of leaving X anytime soon.

        Same here. I use fvwm2 as my Window Manager and I am not going to move for some supposed benefits I really cannot see at this time.

        • Same here. I use fvwm2 as my Window Manager and I am not going to move for some supposed benefits I really cannot see at this time.

          Time to upgrade to FVWM3 [github.com].
          I'll keep going with Fedora until their X.org stops working, or fvwm3 works with Wayland (there are some posts on this) or Wayland supports Zaphod heads (maybe never?).

          • Other than being "newer" (and probably more likely to receive bug fixes), what's different between FVWM2 and FVWM3? I'm also still at 2.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            I see absolutely no reason to. FVWM2 works nicely and is supported. I do not need "new features". Updating just in order to get a higher version number is the hallmark of stupidity.

          • Wayland supports Zaphod heads

            What practical advantage do you get with Zaphod heads, as opposed to regular multiple monitor setup with the same X session ?

      • Cinnamon’s support for Wayland is incredibly crappy. It’s still years and years away from prime time. You should be safe until the 2030s if not later.

      • Thanks for the comments! Very useful to know what others find works best for them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I had the misfortune to work with Red Had Enterprise for some customer a while ago. This thing is so broken it does not feel like Linux anymore in many ways. I don't expect Fedora is really any better.

    • OBS still doesn’t support Wayland for screen recording. This is still the #1 feature I need.

      Also, in Wayland, Firefox doesn’t scale the fonts at all, making it completely unusable on HiDPI monitors...

      • OBS definitely works for me on gnome/wayland via pipewire. Both for window and fullscreen recording.

        • Well, that's the thing isn't it. Wayland doesn't support screen recording. So, compositors need some sort of side channel which means it's something of a crapshoot. It's also why despite Wayland being "simpler" than X, the overall system is more complicated.

      • Wow, OBS is a big thing to not support directly. I wonder what architectural decisions caused this problem with screen recorders and screen savers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by simpz ( 978228 )

      Yup.
      I used to run RHEL at work, Centos at home and Fedora on Desktop (work and home)
      I used to send bug reports to Fedora in the hope they would make it to RH and Centos later.
      Now why should I help you improve RHEL when you are effectively calling me a thief.

      • True. Especially what happened with CentOS - that was very dodgy. An open source non profit voluntarily closed down in favour of RedHat/IBM profits - trademarks and all

  • Wayland is not ready... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bjwest ( 14070 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @08:46PM (#64298633)
    I'm sorry, but Wayland is not ready for the masses yet. It still lacks features that X11 has had for years, and has bugs that prevent me from using it. I don't know why it's taking so long to get things right. It's been over 15 years, and, IMHO, it's not even Beta qality yet. It's almost like the developers are working on it a couple of hours a week.

    • Re:Wayland is not ready... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Zuriel ( 1760072 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @09:12PM (#64298697)

      I'm doing multi-screen high DPI variable refresh gaming on Wayland, so it's made a lot of progress in hammering out tricky edge cases. I think KDE just got initial support for HDR?

      What features do you think the masses need that are still missing?

      • Re:Wayland is not ready... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bjwest ( 14070 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @11:11PM (#64298867)

        What features do you think the masses need that are still missing?

        Remembering window placement and double-clicking on title bar to shade/unshade window to name two of the most annoying missing for me.

        • Remembering window placement and double-clicking on title bar to shade/unshade window to name two of the most annoying missing for me.

          The latter is presumably just a choice of the WM, i.e. compositor and nothing to do with Wayland. The former appears to be a hill the Wayland people want do die on because anything relying on that is "legacy" despite being a program people need to do their work, unlike Wayland.

      • Do screensavers/screenlock work yet?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Zuriel ( 1760072 )
          Locking the screen works fine. Screen savers kind of became irrelevant when we stopped using screens that burn in and started using screens that support power management.

          • Screen savers kind of became irrelevant when we stopped using screens that burn in and started using screens that support power management.

            Son, you never ever used my old ASUS ROG g17 gaming laptop with an OLED screen!!

            I used Gnome 41 + Wayland and in a month, it had the Gnome taskbar and terminal menu bar both etched into its screen for all time.

            After another month, the damn Slack left menubar with all the channel names got burned in, too!!

            OLED burn in HARD and FAST !!

          • Power management also doesn't work properly on Wayland. I am currently seeing a bug where the screen will keep turning back on to a black blank screen when locked. And yes, I have lock screen notifications disabled.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by hogleg ( 1147911 )

              I had this problem. Turns it it was my monitor that was set for auto-detect. Once I disabled that the issue was resolved.

      • 1. Screen sharing support in anything besides Chrome. Particularly MS Teams.
        2. Ability to screen record in OBS, without extreme challenges.
        3. Scaling fonts on HiDPI in Firefox on Wayland.
        4. BEING ABLE TO TURN OFF THE MONITOR (!!!) It seriously doesn’t work.
        5. Wayland always honors Chrome’s “DO NOT SLEEP” imperative, so if you have one video on one background tab opened, your laptop will never sleep or even lock the screen.
        6. DOES NOT WORK well at all on Cinnamon Desktop and KDE doesn

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Zuriel ( 1760072 )

          Screen sharing and screen recording needs Pipewire support, IIRC. I just tried OBS and it worked out of the box - run it, click add source, click window capture (pipewire) and I can start recording this Firefox window.

          Firefox after v121 should work fine under Wayland with whatever DPI you set. Earlier versions needed MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 set so that it actually used Wayland.

          I mean... my 4k screen and the random crappy TV I have plugged in both turn off when they're supposed to. I'm not sure what to tell you

    • I've been using Wayland exclusively for quite a while. Haven't run into any issues.
      • I will give my experience. However, I am not a guru when it comes to computers so take it with a grain of salt. The problem I have with my Vanilla Debian installation of Debian 12 with Gnome on an old Dell 755 Optiplex from 2008 is that if Gnome has Wayland and I click on either Thunderbird or Firefox, a black box shows up on the desktop and that is it. If i change it to Gnome with Xorg, Thunderbird and Firefox come up like normal. I do not know what would cause that, but it has been true for the last c

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      I'm sorry, but Wayland is not ready for the masses yet. It still lacks features that X11 has had for years, and has bugs that prevent me from using it. I don't know why it's taking so long to get things right. It's been over 15 years, and, IMHO, it's not even Beta qality yet. It's almost like the developers are working on it a couple of hours a week.

      Same here, to much stuff I do need X11 to work. I guess Wayland is perfect when you move your grand mother from Windows to Linux although.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        So basically another toy in the Linux space. Well, let those that want toys play with it then. I want things that work.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          Well, I respect beta testers a lot and I try to do my best at it as far as possible. Toys sometimes become real tools. In the end, I think Wayland has a different way to think how display should work. More optimization when everything is running local to the host at the cost of less flexibility when you try to distribute the use case across the network.

          • More optimization when everything is running local to the host

            It isn't, though. When you are running locally with modern apps and using a compositor then X is doing basically the same job as Wayland, and the old crufty parts of X are just sitting there doing nothing until you need them for an old application, at which point you have them.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Given that one of my primary use-cases for a GUI on Linux is remote X, I think I will continue to ignore Wayland.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ls671 ( 1122017 )

              Same here, I even watch videos with audio locally played on a remote machine, works fine as long as you wrap the X connection taking care of enabling compression with ssh -C. I do the same for development etc., done on remote machines displaying on my local computer. My local desktop barely runs anything but displays stuff from a bunch or remote computers. VNC and X2Go in the mix as well.

    • Maybe instead of a 'return to office' memo, rephrase it to something the coders can understand e.g. set your attribute from non display to bold or something

    • Wayland developers: "It would be hard to fix X"
      Also Wayland developers: *flail around for over a decade making a substitute which still doesn't do what X does, let alone work*

      The new shiny shiny always beckons, but it's not always wise to go that direction.

      • They sucked up to Red Hat / IBM and made their bed. The Fedora project also was the first to jump on board with Pottering's crapware like Pulseaudio or System===D. I'm not surprised they are still around because idiots and assholes tend to flock together. I was never a fan of their distro but now with the historical perspective of them constantly betting on bad monkeys, I'm pretty much gonna say whatever Fedora does, avoid it like the plague. I've long abandoned Linux for *BSD.

      • Quite.

        You'd think that if X was such an over complicated mess as is often claimed, then a feature for feature replacement would be easy. Turns out a lot of the "weird shit" that X did, it did for a good reason and people actually want that to work.

        One of the more hilariously stupid ones was how the GNOME chaps declared that middle mouse paste was an "easter egg" an really tried to get rid of it. The really colossally stupid thing was that, well certainly Apple and Microsoft have a poor imitation of it and

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kiore ( 734594 )

      There will come a time when Wayland is feature complete enough to replace X for me, but until then I will resist attempts to force it on me by distros.

      Latest missing feature I've found is numlockx, my wife's laptop has a small keyboard & always boots up with a little under half the alphabet keys being numbers. She doesn't do data entry. I want a login script for her to turn this off for her

      A few years back, I couldn't run Synaptic as root in a window (now fixed). I like to run synaptic for application i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      It won't get ready without distributions shipping it. How are you supposed to find bugs without having users?

      Have a look at the KDE folks. They had to ship a completely broken 4.0 to get developers to fix their things to work with the cleaned up architecture. It got usable around 4.2, but many Linux distributions shipped 4.0, so they got their feedback. Now, plasma 6 is greater than ever, still building upon the cleanup that happened between 3.x and 4.0.

  • Give the people what they want (Score:3)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Thursday March 07, 2024 @10:05PM (#64298789) Homepage Journal

    ... Or not. As the case may be.

    That it's not enabled out-of-the-box implies that testing priority is lower. Without a customer's paying for things like a support contract, or specifically paying for features like X.org, maybe it doesn't matter if Fedora makes people go through a single extra step to install it. Installing it yourself does communicate that you're on your own if it doesn't work, but that's kind of the assumption with Fedora to begin with.

    I still have a lot of Wayland issues on my more exotic configurations. But GTK and Qt apps work, sometimes even on multiple monitors. Old X apps don't work worth a damn on Xwayland, but only a few of us weirdos care.

    I've read lots and lots on Wayland (and actively develop for it). But I keep coming back to being rather skeptical that starting over with a new architecture was really necessary. It took a decade for Wayland to catch up, and in a few use cases it never caught up. It wasn't a giant leap forward, more like a step sideways. It's here now, and I can't stop it.

    • Still on XFCE... It works on low end hardware and doesn't get in the way.

      I gave Wayfire a try recently. As a compositor it works well enough but as a desktop environment it would need some polish.

      So I'm confident that if xfwm4 adopted a wlroots-based solution as a drop-in replacement then it would be relatively mature enough.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by G00F ( 241765 )

      I'm a mate user so I haven't really used it. What are the expected bugs? I've read that there has been issue with multi monitor.

      But there's been a long standing giant issue I've had with X.org, and thats screensaver implementation. It's been crap and unsecure for decades. (like I can move mouse, sometimes able to launch and app or type a command before screensaver lock screen comes up, etc) Also, occasionally have issues waking up and getting lock screen

      • Wayland "fixed" the screensaver issue by simply not supporting screensavers at all.

        • Re:Give the people what they want (Score:4, Interesting)

          by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Friday March 08, 2024 @12:07AM (#64298945)
          Which was the correct move for it to make.
          It is the job of the compositor/display server to handle screensavers, not the core protocol layer.

          If GNOME or KDE ever decides they care about screensavers, they'll add support for them.
          But frankly, they won't, because nobody gives a fuck anymore.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            I do. Not to save screens but as a security mechanism. You will also find that in some regulated environments, automatic screen-lock after a certain inactivity time is mandatory.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by olau ( 314197 )

              Screen locking is supported alright. You can even activate it with a keyboard shortcut.

            • Screen lock works fine (my environment requires it too)
              That is distinct from the concept of a screen saver.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            If GNOME or KDE ever decides they care about screensavers, they'll add support for them.

            GNOME did add support for screensavers.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

            Though, gnome-screensaver pretty much only blanks the screen these days - it was a frontend to xscreensaver in the 2.x days, in the 3.x days it was on its own, and currently it just handles blanking and pulling up the login screen.

            I admit, I haven't touched screen saver settings in over a decade - and the only reason I did was I got a laptop with an

          • Re:Give the people what they want (Score:4, Informative)

            by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Friday March 08, 2024 @05:56AM (#64299327) Journal

            Which was the correct move for it to make.

            It was not. Security infrastructure is hard to do well, just look at how many times GNOME have fucked up with their screensaver and incessant NIH, much to the irritation of jwz.

            Leaving pieces of critical security infrastructure as "out of scope", for someone else to figure out and for every compositor author to do separately is a recipe for disaster. It's even worse than the X model where if you use a good screensaver it works pretty well most of the time, because now your screensave is inherently tied to your window manager and you don't have the flexibility for when GNOME inevitably fuck up yet again.

            Simply saying BuT tHaTs OuT oF sCoPe is the classic Wayland excuse for choosing a poor design where important security components are scattered around at random.

            But frankly, they won't, because nobody gives a fuck anymore.

            Hand me your laptop without the screen locked and we'll see how much of a fuck you give or not.

            • It was not. Security infrastructure is hard to do well, just look at how many times GNOME have fucked up with their screensaver and incessant NIH, much to the irritation of jwz.

              This is a fucking laughable claim when you put it into the context of the fucking security of xscreensaver

              Leaving pieces of critical security infrastructure as "out of scope", for someone else to figure out and for every compositor author to do separately is a recipe for disaster. It's even worse than the X model where if you use a good screensaver it works pretty well most of the time, because now your screensave is inherently tied to your window manager and you don't have the flexibility for when GNOME inevitably fuck up yet again.

              Do you think xscreensaver is specially privileged in X?
              To add screensaver functionality as part of the core protocol is to repeat the mistake of X. You don't understand that mistake, so you're eager to repeat it.

              Simply saying BuT tHaTs OuT oF sCoPe is the classic Wayland excuse for choosing a poor design where important security components are scattered around at random.

              Come on. You've made it clear you have no fucking idea what you're talking about here, and now you want to tell us what "poor design" is?
              Give me a fucking break.

              Hand me your laptop without the screen locked and we'll see how much of a fuck you give or not.

              Are you confused about the diff

              • This is a fucking laughable claim when you put it into the context of the fucking security of xscreensaver

                Are you claiming that GNOME screensaver hasn't had a number of security breaches which were identified and solved years before in xscreensaver?

                To add screensaver functionality as part of the core protocol is to repeat the mistake of X. You don't understand that mistake, so you're eager to repeat it.

                X has no screen locking (and yes lock and screensaver are used interchangeably by 99.999% of people despit

                • Are you claiming that GNOME screensaver hasn't had a number of security breaches which were identified and solved years before in xscreensaver?

                  I'm claiming that the methodology that xscreensaver uses is insecure by design, and cannot be secured. You're laughing at your neighbors security with no locks on your door.

                  X has no screen locking (and yes lock and screensaver are used interchangeably by 99.999% of people despite technically being different, deal with it.) in the core protocol. Just like Wayland.

                  Correct. X has no screen locking, which is the problem. Any X client can pretend to be a screen locker.
                  In Wayland, the compositor is free to handle it, and the compositor is by definition secure.
                  In the X model, the X server is the root of trust. In the Wayland model, the compositor is the root of trust, and Wayland is merely a protocol

                  • and the compositor is by definition secure.

                    This, here sums up Wayland fanboyism in one single line. You believe that by the magic of declarations, Wayland is secure. That's not how security works, sonnyboy.

          • But frankly, they won't, because nobody gives a fuck anymore.

            I am nobody. So are plenty of other people. We love being dismissed like that.

            • I am nobody. So are plenty of other people. We love being dismissed like that.

              You'll get over it.
              It's nothing personal, though you're free to take it personally if you're really that eager to feel persecuted.

              Resources are limited, and so features are added in a democratic fashion, with deviations from that for individual people who put in the work.
              You know this, I'm pretty sure.

      • But there's been a long standing giant issue I've had with X.org, and thats screensaver implementation. It's been crap and unsecure for decades.

        Are you using xscreensaver?

  • Those who choose to run Gnome as their desktop, they deserve to be hit with Wayland. I am happy with MATE and don't expect Wayland to be on my radar anytime soon.

  • Wayland boondoggle (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Wayland falls in the group with HURD, WINE, Haiku OS, BTRFS, IPV6, and all the rest. These are mostly projects that had the idea of starting fresh to fix all the previous bad designs (or a previous version of themselves). They then realize WHY those old things were the way they were and the scope grows out of control. Their own stuff becomes impossible to manage and the whole project turns in to a dumpster fire.

    They will NEVER be complete. They can't even match what they are meant to replace in terms of fea

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vbdasc ( 146051 )

      What are Haiku OS and WINE meant to replace?

    • Haiku doesn't belong on your list. BeOS was a good design and so is Haiku. The problem with it isn't architectural, it's support. Without support for more hardware, it is meaningless. And it's probably never going to get that support. I wouldn't try to talk anyone out of hobbies that aren't hurting anyone, but it's still fairly foolish.

  • Pity that distros made these two gigantic bad choices recently and didn't ease up on the gas when the cliff got near.

  • Maybe it will help wayland development? (Score:3)

    by jddimarco ( 1754954 ) on Friday March 08, 2024 @12:06PM (#64300085)
    It's just the default of what is installed that is changing. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: it will cause fedora users to try to live in an X.org free world, and if they can't, they can always install X.org. The attempt to live without X.org will likely result in the wayland people getting more input about further things they need to do/fix in wayland to make it easier to live entirely without X.org, and that can't hurt.

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