Debian 10 "Buster" Currently Defaults To GNOME On Wayland, But That Still Could Change

As it stands now the upcoming release of Debian 10 "Buster" will provide a default desktop of the GNOME Shell running atop Wayland, but that still could change with a Debian developer suggesting the experience might not be good enough for this next release that they would be better off still using the X.Org Server.

While some distributions like Fedora and RHEL8 are defaulting to GNOME atop Wayland, others like Ubuntu are preferring GNOME on X.Org for the time being due to Wayland bugs, driver/GPU compatibility concerns, and other issues. With Debian Buster, they had been following the advice of the Debian GNOME team that the default GNOME session should be Wayland in place of the X.Org Server.

Debian developer Jonathan Dowland meanwhile expressed concerns today that the X.Org vs. Wayland decision didn't follow the same approach when Debian debated init systems and ultimately decided to adopt systemd. In his recent testing of Debian Buster with GNOME on Wayland, he's also uncovered some "fairly serious bugs" around drag-and-drop problems and the session manager / desktop locking up if the root disk becomes full.

Dowland says he is exciting about the prospects of Wayland and various projects brewing around it, but he argues that for Buster it should be GNOME/X.Org by default. More details on his blog. It remains to be seen if this will get any action on changing the default, but he hopes at the very least more Debian users will begin testing the GNOME/Wayland stack and report any bugs they experience.