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Fedora Workstation 41 will drop GNOME X.Org session as fallback option

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While defaulting to Wayland since version 25 of Fedora Workstation (GNOME), and Fedora version 34 for the KDE Plasma Desktop spin, this Linux distribution intends to completely ditch X.Org session as fallback for GNOME on release 41.

Quoting Jens Petersen from the change number 414 of fedora-workstation Pague

Fedora Workstation WG discussed this today and we agreed we should do this for Fedora 41, since it is really too late already for F40 and it should really be handled as a System Wide Change anyway.

Based on that message we can conclude that while it is too late to have that change merged into Fedora 40, it is likely that this will be the default for Fedora 41, making GNOME completely bound to Wayland with no X.Org fallback.

While one user on that same discussion stated that screen reader users will still rely on the X11 session because of some GNOME bugs, it is likely that any software still using X11 by default will not be distributed with the installation ISO as pointed out by Neal Gompa.

Other than that, no matter if you are an NVIDIA, Intel or AMD user, this might be a really good move starting with Fedora because GNOME developers can focus on fixing existing Wayland bugs instead of wasting time with three layers (X.Org, Wayland and in some cases XWayland).

The ChangeSet page for that Fedora 41 was not updated with this change as per the date of this article.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I'm and enthusiast of Linux on Laptops and Secure Boot related stuff. Playing exclusively on Linux since 2013. Played on Wine on dates that trace back to 2008(Diablo 2, Lineage 2...). A troubleshooter that used to work with strace and it is now working with Kubernetes...
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Tuxee Mar 8
Quoting: sudoerSo basically games that are using Proton/WINE won't work at all with Fedora 41?

Why? Playing Doom Eternal and Death Stranding here on my desktop which has been on Wayland for literally years now without any issues. It's an AMD card with Mesa drivers, though.
jordicoma Mar 8
Quoting: sudoer
Quoting: jens
Quoting: sudoerSo basically games that are using Proton/WINE won't work at all with Fedora 41?

No. Proton/Wine works just fine, also currently, using XWayland on a Wayland desktop session.

Thanks, I think I heard recently (from the TLE youtube guy) that it was not possible, maybe I misunderstood it.

Wine just released an experimental driver for wayland, but I don't think thats usable for games.

If you run wayland you may have XWayland. XWayland it's a wrapper (from Xorg) for running to wayland.
Basically it starts an Xserver(Xorg), executes the program and renderizes to wayland instead of the screen.

If the hardware/driver is capable of wayland and you have xwayland should not be problems.


Last edited by jordicoma on 8 March 2024 at 11:29 am UTC
Xpander Mar 8
X11 still works perfectly here.. Multiple different refresh monitors and the likes have not been an issue on X11, just have to sync to highest refresh in order to prevent vsyncs/compositors cap to lowest.
Im quite sure that X11 will be still around quite some time. I personally can't switch before my Desktop Environment of choice starts supporting it fully without any edge case issues..So plenty of time to still roll on X11.
LibreTEK Mar 8
Quoting: XpanderX11 still works perfectly here.. Multiple different refresh monitors and the likes have not been an issue on X11, just have to sync to highest refresh in order to prevent vsyncs/compositors cap to lowest.
Im quite sure that X11 will be still around quite some time. I personally can't switch before my Desktop Environment of choice starts supporting it fully without any edge case issues..So plenty of time to still roll on X11.
In the same boat as you man; I need an Nvidia GPU for work (DaVinci Resolve, Darktable, etc) and X11 is the only reason I'm able to ditch Windows completely. Wayland is a fantastic thing, sure, but I can't help but feel the bandwagon for it is taking off a little too quickly...
Quoting: jens
Quoting: pleasereadthemanualMy experience is that Krita is terrible on GNOME, Wayland or X11, with a NVIDIA GPU. My Wacom tablet works properly on KDE Wayland and only KDE Wayland.

Of course, Krita's toolbar flickers black every 5 seconds so it's a little distracting.

Have I mentioned how tired I am of NVIDIA's proprietary drivers before?

Cool to hear that the KDE folks got their tablet support right. I'm using my Wacom tablet solemnly as a mouse replacement, not for actual drawing. So slightly different use case I guess. Lots of Wacom related PR's got merged for the upcoming Gnome version, so I have hopes that the normal interaction works better, but things like https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2983 are still open and probably no that easy to address :(

Yeah, the flickering might be related to the implicit/explicit sync issues. I sincerely hope that https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/90 gets merged soon and all related PR's land in compositors, xwayland etc. From my understanding, that should solve all flickering (asuming what you are seeing is related to that). Side note, reading through the discussion of that PR, NVIDIA engineers are pushing for this and contributed heavily, so it is not NVIDIA that is holding back.
The strange thing is, Krita was not flickering in the 535 series of NVIDIA drivers. It was only in the 545 series that the flickering was introduced. Fortunately, my entire monitor no longer flickers, so I guess I'll take it...

My understanding is that AMD and Intel's drivers implement implicit sync but NVIDIA doesn't want to implement that; they want explicit sync because implicit sync is imperfect, but I'd take imperfection over the flickerfest. I haven't looked into it at all; that's just what I've heard. Some cursory reading suggests this is accurate.

I don't know what the experience is like on AMD, but I've never gotten any flickering on my Intel iGPU. I hope this is fixed sometime soon, because it's a pain in several of my programs, including Steam. The end of that merge request is looking good...they all seem pretty happy with it. Implementations to follow in a few months?!


Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 8 March 2024 at 1:29 pm UTC
Tuxee Mar 8
Quoting: LibreTEK
Quoting: XpanderX11 still works perfectly here.. Multiple different refresh monitors and the likes have not been an issue on X11, just have to sync to highest refresh in order to prevent vsyncs/compositors cap to lowest.
Im quite sure that X11 will be still around quite some time. I personally can't switch before my Desktop Environment of choice starts supporting it fully without any edge case issues..So plenty of time to still roll on X11.
In the same boat as you man; I need an Nvidia GPU for work (DaVinci Resolve, Darktable, etc) and X11 is the only reason I'm able to ditch Windows completely. Wayland is a fantastic thing, sure, but I can't help but feel the bandwagon for it is taking off a little too quickly...

What's the problem with darktable on Wayland? Have been using this combo for years now. And "too quickly"? I mean, this thing has been in the making for 15 f*cking years now...
LibreTEK Mar 8
Quoting: Tuxee
Quoting: LibreTEK
Quoting: XpanderX11 still works perfectly here.. Multiple different refresh monitors and the likes have not been an issue on X11, just have to sync to highest refresh in order to prevent vsyncs/compositors cap to lowest.
Im quite sure that X11 will be still around quite some time. I personally can't switch before my Desktop Environment of choice starts supporting it fully without any edge case issues..So plenty of time to still roll on X11.
In the same boat as you man; I need an Nvidia GPU for work (DaVinci Resolve, Darktable, etc) and X11 is the only reason I'm able to ditch Windows completely. Wayland is a fantastic thing, sure, but I can't help but feel the bandwagon for it is taking off a little too quickly...

What's the problem with darktable on Wayland? Have been using this combo for years now. And "too quickly"? I mean, this thing has been in the making for 15 f*cking years now...

Darktable on Wayland is fine, but using it with an AMD gpu is horrible because of the lack of OpenCL support, and using an NVIDIA gpu on Wayland is... yep. And yes, too quickly, if it cant be a drop in replacement for X11 then it's not ready and distros are rushing it.
CatKiller Mar 8
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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualMy understanding is that AMD and Intel's drivers implement implicit sync but NVIDIA doesn't want to implement that; they want explicit sync because implicit sync is imperfect, but I'd take imperfection over the flickerfest. I haven't looked into it at all; that's just what I've heard. Some cursory reading suggests this is accurate.

There's a quite detailed article about the issues with implicit synchronisation and the work being done to explicitly synchronise like every other platform (including Android) does here.

The crux of it is
Quoting: CollaboraEach of those can be pretty bad by itself but when you put them together the result is that, in practice, using implicit synchronization in Vulkan would completely serialize all work and kill your multi-queue parallelism. So we shut it off if the kernel driver allows it.

If we're turning off implicit synchronization, how do we synchronize with the window system? That's the real question, isn't it? There are a number of different strategies for this which have been employed by various drivers over the years and they all come down to some form of selective enabling of implicit synchronization. Also, they're all terrible and lead to over-synchronization somewhere.
Tuxee Mar 8
Quoting: LibreTEKDarktable on Wayland is fine, but using it with an AMD gpu is horrible because of the lack of OpenCL support, and using an NVIDIA gpu on Wayland is... yep. And yes, too quickly, if it cant be a drop in replacement for X11 then it's not ready and distros are rushing it.

There is OpenCL support with AMD gpus. OpenCL support can be installed standalone from the AMD repos along the Mesa drivers.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1406137/how-enable-opencl-on-amd-gpu-ubuntu-22-04-lts
STiAT Mar 8
Hope we can use NVK by then... since I have little hope that the proprietary nvidia wayland support will get better, to be true, it got worse from 535 to 545 :D. Those flickering issue in certain applications is annoying.
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