Fedora 41 Installer Proceeding To Transition From X11 To Wayland App

With Fedora's new web-based installer UI being delayed to 2025 with Fedora 42, part of Red Hat's justification for that setback was needing to invest resources first in Fedora 41 by transitioning the OS installer to being a native Wayland application. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now signed off on that work as expected to make the Anaconda OS installer a native Wayland application.

While Fedora Linux has been going full bore on Wayland for years, the Anaconda installer application has remained dependent upon X11 and in turn XWayland. With Fedora 41 the plan is to drop the X11 dependence within Anaconda and make it a native Wayland application. In turn this opens the door for dropping the X11 dependencies from Fedora's installation ISO images.

Transitioning Anaconda to a native Wayland application also involves switching the remote GUI support from TigerVNC to RDP with the GNOME Remote Desktop. The added benefit in going with RDP for remote installer GUI support is better security and performance. There are also other complexities involved in the native Wayland support such as around the keyboard handling.

FESCo has granted the necessary approval for this work to move forward with Fedora 41 to ideally have the Anaconda installer as a native Wayland app in time for the OS release in October. More details on the approved plans via the Fedora Wiki.