Fedora 36 Planning To Run Wayland By Default With NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

While all of the software components are out there now for being able to run NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack with modern (GBM-based) Wayland compositors by default, including XWayland support, Fedora Workstation currently defaults to using an X.Org based session with the green binary blob. However, for Fedora 36 next spring they are planning on using the Wayland-based desktop here too.

Fedora Workstation for a while now has defaulted successfully to using the Wayland-based GNOME Shell desktop but with the NVIDIA proprietary driver they have kept to using the X.Org session. Thanks to the NVIDIA 495 series driver introducing GBM support and other improvements made to accelerated XWayland, etc, running NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack for daily Wayland-based desktop use is becoming viable.

GNOME on X.Org will remain available for those who want it while the F36 change proposal submitted today would tweak the udev rule for GDM so those using the NVIDIA 495 series or newer would see the Wayland session by default.

Fedora 36 is due for release in April, with the hope now of being able to use Wayland across the board... With NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack now working well with Wayland, 2022 could see the X.Org/X11 session support receding further in the Linux ecosystem.

The Fedora 36 plan for Wayland by default with the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack is laid out on the Fedora Wiki for those interested in more of the technical details.