GNOME Session & GDM Can Now Be Built Without X11 Support

Following the recent work to Mutter and GNOME Shell that was merged for allowing to build with X11 support disabled, the GDM display manager and GNOME-Session code have also seen the ability added to compile without X11 support.

This week GDM and gnome-session were the latest components for GNOME 47 to now allow optionally building without X11 support. This is part of the broader effort beginning with GNOME 47 to allow compiling with X11 support disabled. This is driven in part by Fedora / Red Hat with Fedora Workstation 41 planning to ship with Wayland-only GNOME for its installation ISOs.

This was the GDM merge request to allow stripping out X.Org support. The new "BUILD_XORG_SUPPORT" Meson option is gating whether to compile the X.Org code if wanting a Wayland-only environment. This is the similar merge request on the gnome-session side to allow disabling X11-related code.

These GDM and GNOME Session changes were brought up as part of this week's This Week In GNOME update that also saw more CI/CD work happen around GNOME OS, a new Phosh release, and other updates.