Fedora Workstation 41 Install Media Will Ship With Wayland-Only GNOME

Fedora Workstation 41 has been granted approval for its installation media (ISOs) to ship with only Wayland GNOME support with the X11 support removed.

First things first, the GNOME X11 support will remain available in the Fedora 41 package archive. This newly-approved change proposal is around the (GNOME) Fedora Workstation installation media that the GNOME X11 packages will be removed to make it a Wayland-only desktop out-of-the-box. All of the GNOME X11 packages will remain available in the repositories but not be pre-installed anymore. This change will also not impact those upgrading from prior Fedora Linux releases where the X11 session support is available by default.

This Fedora 41 change proposal goes along with GNOME's upstream focus to ultimately deprecate and eventually remove X11 session support. Upstream GNOME 47 recently saw support merged in GNOME Shell and Mutter for being able to build as Wayland-only without X11 dependencies included.

More details on the change proposal now approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) for Fedora 41 can be found via the Fedora Wiki.