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

[AnAccount]

Fedora will lose some users over this. Wayland works well in general, but off the top of my head screen sharing still doesn't fully work, video screen recording still doesn't fully work, and global hotkeys for applications such as VLC still don't work. There's probably a lot more issues still. Some people such as myself use these every day for work. Without an Xorg fallback this will be a non-starter.

Both screensharing and screenrecording works fine. There are well defined API:s that will allow applications to read the screen and share or record it. I use screensharing with wayland quite often using google meet (with both chromium and firefox). However, not all applications are using these APIs, and hence cannot screenshare under Wayland, but it is not a limitation of Wayland any more, but a limitation of the specific application. Skype actually had this implemented in their preview version, but choose to remove that again. So, for Skype it is a deliberate choice to not support Wayland.

[Jumbotron]

It’s about time for this to happen.

[MastaG]

You're understanding of Wayland seems to not be up to date.
Screen sharing/recording & hot keys works if the portasl are implemented.

KDE6 had these features.
Hyprland from what I've seen has them.
I don't follow Gnome 🤷♂️

Indeed. I'm using ms teams for work in chromium on Fedora 39 Wayland and both video conferencing and desktop sharing works just fine.

[sindex]

One would think that's the right move after so many years. If only, the Wayland session in GNOME was production ready after so much time. Right now, if the shell crashes, everything goes with it, that's not production ready in 2024. We're talking about a shell that's constantly changing and is partly written in JS and worst of all, even third-party extensions run in the same process, bugs and hence crashes are unavoidable. While it's true that X.Org also can't survive crashes, that happens extremely rarely nowadays because of how it's used and years of bug-fixing in compositors, e.t.c.. A bug in an extension may crash the shell or even the compositor could crash but will restart and the state will be preserved. Of course, Vista back in 2006 was and still is much better than any Linux stack and can survive a display server crash and despite the complete overhaul in the display stack, software for XP or earlier work just fine in Vista and later versions.

[bacteriamanicure]

But despite having been using fedora for 20 years I will keep yelling at the clouds instead of installing X or changing distribution

Stop changing things!

c5e70f47817010913b21a29cf0e2fb07b537e2473506bb1b184d508e0c656411~2.jpg

Can't you just not update?

[omer666]

One would think that's the right move after so many years. If only, the Wayland session in GNOME was production ready after so much time. Right now, if the shell crashes, everything goes with it, that's not production ready in 2024. We're talking about a shell that's constantly changing and is partly written in JS and worst of all, even third-party extensions run in the same process, bugs and hence crashes are unavoidable. While it's true that X.Org also can't survive crashes, that happens extremely rarely nowadays because of how it's used and years of bug-fixing in compositors, e.t.c.. A bug in an extension may crash the shell or even the compositor could crash but will restart and the state will be preserved. Of course, Vista back in 2006 was and still is much better than any Linux stack and can survive a display server crash and despite the complete overhaul in the display stack, software for XP or earlier work just fine in Vista and later versions.

I've been running GNOME on Wayland daily for several months now and I've never seen it crash, so I think it is production ready. Agreed, I don't use extensions so I don't know if it could bring the whole desktop down...

[Hibbelharry]

One would think that's the right move after so many years. If only, the Wayland session in GNOME was production ready after so much time. Right now, if the shell crashes, everything goes with it, that's not production ready in 2024. We're talking about a shell that's constantly changing and is partly written in JS and worst of all, even third-party extensions run in the same process, bugs and hence crashes are unavoidable. While it's true that X.Org also can't survive crashes, that happens extremely rarely nowadays because of how it's used and years of bug-fixing in compositors, e.t.c.. A bug in an extension may crash the shell or even the compositor could crash but will restart and the state will be preserved. Of course, Vista back in 2006 was and still is much better than any Linux stack and can survive a display server crash and despite the complete overhaul in the display stack, software for XP or earlier work just fine in Vista and later versions.

It seems spring is coming, there's another little bird!

[reba]

You're understanding of Wayland seems to not be up to date.
Screen sharing/recording & hot keys works if the portasl are implemented.

KDE6 had these features.
Hyprland from what I've seen has them.
I don't follow Gnome 🤷♂️

Indeed.

Screensharing, OBS etc. work fine here on my Debian with an wlroots-based desktop. No problems.

[cynic]

Fedora will lose some users over this. Wayland works well in general, but off the top of my head screen sharing still doesn't fully work, video screen recording still doesn't fully work, and global hotkeys for applications such as VLC still don't work. There's probably a lot more issues still. Some people such as myself use these every day for work. Without an Xorg fallback this will be a non-starter.

This decision will hopefully put some pressure to the involved projects to fix the remaining Wayland bugs.
F41 is still months aways: there's hope that some of them will be fixed in time.

[jacob]

Fedora will lose some users over this. Wayland works well in general, but off the top of my head screen sharing still doesn't fully work, video screen recording still doesn't fully work, and global hotkeys for applications such as VLC still don't work. There's probably a lot more issues still. Some people such as myself use these every day for work. Without an Xorg fallback this will be a non-starter.

This will create extra pressure to address those issues (except for global hotkeys which are not possible by design, except maybe through some special Gnome Shell extension).