Ubuntu 24.10 Now Defaults To Wayland On NVIDIA

With Ubuntu 24.10 due for release in October one of the expressed planned changes has been NVIDIA defaulting to using Wayland rather than X11 for the default desktop session. As of this past week the change is now in place for Ubuntu 24.10 daily users that will find Wayland-by-default when using the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

The proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver has been the hold-out on Ubuntu in sticking to the GNOME X.Org session out-of-the-box rather than Wayland as has been the default for the past several releases when using other GPUs/drivers. But for Ubuntu 24.10, the plan is to cross that threshold for NVIDIA now that their official driver has much better Wayland support and has matured into great shape. Particularly with the upcoming NVIDIA R555 driver reaching stable very soon, the Wayland support is in great shape with features like explicit sync ready to use.

Canonical's Daniel van Vugt of the Ubuntu desktop team made the change last week for the GDM session manager to drop their NVIDIA-prefers-X11 patches so that NVIDIA Linux users will find Wayland being used by default.

The GDM 46.0-2ubuntu2 package update notes:

"Remove the Ubuntu-specific rules that made Xorg the default for Nvidia. Updated Revert-data-Disable-GDM-on-hybrid-graphics-laptops-with-v.patch to ensure Nvidia 5xx drivers always get Wayland as the default unless there's a stronger reason why it won't work (like modeset has been disabled on the kernel command line). Also refresh the patch description with a more recent justification."

Ubuntu 24.10 will be on GNOME 47 by the time it ships in October along with a number of other updates for this post-LTS release.