Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Will Default To Wayland With NVIDIA For v510+ Driver

A change that had been expected but finally buttoned up in time for next month's Jammy Jellyfish release: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will now default to using the GNOME Wayland session when running the NVIDIA proprietary driver. The caveat/limitation is that's only the case when using the NVIDIA 510 series driver or newer and not when using any of the older legacy driver branches.

Ubuntu Linux has been defaulting to GNOME on Wayland going back to Ubuntu 21.04 for Intel and AMD Radeon graphics. However, the NVIDIA proprietary driver has continued defaulting to the GNOME X.Org session. That remained the case for Ubuntu 21.04 and 21.10 cycles, but thankfully over the past several months NVIDIA has been working to address bugs in their Wayland support and most notably having implemented Generic Buffer Manager (GBM) support within their walled garden.

The NVIDIA 510 series driver especially is in good shape for Wayland and especially with the well-tested GNOME Mutter Wayland compositor. NVIDIA's Wayland support is even in good shape for gaming and in 2022 it makes sense defaulting to the Wayland session when using this latest and current stable driver series.

This past week a GDM3 package update for the display manager hit the Jammy archive for making that default change. The GNOME Display Manager rule has been updated that Wayland is now the default for the NVIDIA 510 series driver.

The X.Org session remains available from the log-in screen for those not wanting to use the Wayland session on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS regardless of your GPU / display driver.