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

By - | Views: 36,547

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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jens Mar 9
  • Supporter
Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI do think you're right that it's an awful time to be a newcomer, because you're stuck with two not-very-great options right now. There's cool and fundamental stuff on Wayland you won't see on Xorg, but there are definite issues with Wayland too. I hope that the pain now will result in a great experience in 2025, which is just around the time some people might be considering their options.

And out of genuine curiosity, what is missing on Wayland? I wanted to compile a list so I can keep tabs on the issues, but so far I've got:

* Explicit Sync to fix flickering (recently got 3 ACKs and is nearly ready to merge, awaiting implementations in compositors + drivers)
* Color Management Protocol (seems like some early implementations have recently been done and Plasma 6 has limited HDR support)
* Better IME protocol, maybe? It works for me on GNOME and KDE, but the implementation was a little broken on wlroots

Yeah, fully agree that at least for nvidia users this year will be tough when being on Fedora or Arch until all the explicit sync stuff lands. X in Gnome (I don’t know about KDE) is decaying really fast now. Considering developer resources are limited, I still prefer to take the pain now and hope that the Wayland ecosystem (and governance) will shine soon when no longer hands are tied to support X.

What I’m also missing in Gnome land is first class Wacom support and the protocol implementation for drm-lease (VR). That said, I’m happy with Labwc where those things do work.
melkemind Mar 13
Quoting: pleasereadthemanual
Quoting: melkemindThat would explain why now, after all this time, Nvidia has suddenly shown interest in supporting open source drivers.
The open source kernel modules were more a result of discussions with Red Hat: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/

QuoteAnd as the only linux vendor with a significant engineering footprint in GPUs we have been working closely with NVIDIA. People like Kevin Martin, the manager for our GPU technologies team, Ben Skeggs the maintainer of Nouveau and Dave Airlie, the upstream kernel maintainer for the graphics subsystem, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst and our accelerator lead Tom Rix have all taken part in meetings, code reviews and discussions with NVIDIA.

That makes me wonder how much attention they'll ever give to gaming if their main focus is engineering and other technical uses. Has there been any disccussion around actual gaming use? Part of the problem with the proprietary drivers has always been their apathy toward Linux gaming. Any plans for that to change with the open source driver?
Quoting: melkemind
Quoting: pleasereadthemanual
Quoting: melkemindThat would explain why now, after all this time, Nvidia has suddenly shown interest in supporting open source drivers.
The open source kernel modules were more a result of discussions with Red Hat: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/

QuoteAnd as the only linux vendor with a significant engineering footprint in GPUs we have been working closely with NVIDIA. People like Kevin Martin, the manager for our GPU technologies team, Ben Skeggs the maintainer of Nouveau and Dave Airlie, the upstream kernel maintainer for the graphics subsystem, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst and our accelerator lead Tom Rix have all taken part in meetings, code reviews and discussions with NVIDIA.

That makes me wonder how much attention they'll ever give to gaming if their main focus is engineering and other technical uses. Has there been any disccussion around actual gaming use? Part of the problem with the proprietary drivers has always been their apathy toward Linux gaming. Any plans for that to change with the open source driver?
I'm tempted to say NVIDIA is thinking: "I wish they would get to tens of millions of [gaming] users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it." I don't know.

But in some ways, it doesn't matter. It's open source, now, and the community is already doing great work with NVK, Zink, and the Noveau kernel driver (maybe one day replaced by Nova?). Fancy stuff like DLSS might not be there (?, I don't really use any of those features), but I don't think it will be long until Noveau + Zink + NVK is the driver stack we'll be running on NVIDIA almost everywhere because it's just a better experience in general.

I sure hope so...
const Mar 13
Quoting: pleasereadthemanual
Quoting: melkemind
Quoting: pleasereadthemanual
Quoting: melkemindThat would explain why now, after all this time, Nvidia has suddenly shown interest in supporting open source drivers.
The open source kernel modules were more a result of discussions with Red Hat: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/

QuoteAnd as the only linux vendor with a significant engineering footprint in GPUs we have been working closely with NVIDIA. People like Kevin Martin, the manager for our GPU technologies team, Ben Skeggs the maintainer of Nouveau and Dave Airlie, the upstream kernel maintainer for the graphics subsystem, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst and our accelerator lead Tom Rix have all taken part in meetings, code reviews and discussions with NVIDIA.

That makes me wonder how much attention they'll ever give to gaming if their main focus is engineering and other technical uses. Has there been any disccussion around actual gaming use? Part of the problem with the proprietary drivers has always been their apathy toward Linux gaming. Any plans for that to change with the open source driver?
I'm tempted to say NVIDIA is thinking: "I wish they would get to tens of millions of [gaming] users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it." I don't know.

But in some ways, it doesn't matter. It's open source, now, and the community is already doing great work with NVK, Zink, and the Noveau kernel driver (maybe one day replaced by Nova?). Fancy stuff like DLSS might not be there (?, I don't really use any of those features), but I don't think it will be long until Noveau + Zink + NVK is the driver stack we'll be running on NVIDIA almost everywhere because it's just a better experience in general.

I sure hope so...
NVK is turing+, isn't it?
Quoting: const
Quoting: pleasereadthemanual
Quoting: melkemind
Quoting: pleasereadthemanual
Quoting: melkemindThat would explain why now, after all this time, Nvidia has suddenly shown interest in supporting open source drivers.
The open source kernel modules were more a result of discussions with Red Hat: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/

QuoteAnd as the only linux vendor with a significant engineering footprint in GPUs we have been working closely with NVIDIA. People like Kevin Martin, the manager for our GPU technologies team, Ben Skeggs the maintainer of Nouveau and Dave Airlie, the upstream kernel maintainer for the graphics subsystem, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst and our accelerator lead Tom Rix have all taken part in meetings, code reviews and discussions with NVIDIA.

That makes me wonder how much attention they'll ever give to gaming if their main focus is engineering and other technical uses. Has there been any disccussion around actual gaming use? Part of the problem with the proprietary drivers has always been their apathy toward Linux gaming. Any plans for that to change with the open source driver?
I'm tempted to say NVIDIA is thinking: "I wish they would get to tens of millions of [gaming] users, at which point it would actually make sense to support it." I don't know.

But in some ways, it doesn't matter. It's open source, now, and the community is already doing great work with NVK, Zink, and the Noveau kernel driver (maybe one day replaced by Nova?). Fancy stuff like DLSS might not be there (?, I don't really use any of those features), but I don't think it will be long until Noveau + Zink + NVK is the driver stack we'll be running on NVIDIA almost everywhere because it's just a better experience in general.

I sure hope so...
NVK is turing+, isn't it?
Currently yes, but this is from the December 2023 update:

QuoteWe are also continuing to work on Maxwell support. We don't have an ETA yet but the work is ongoing. Most of the work right now is in bringing up the new compiler on Maxwell. While the overall shape of the instruction set is largely the same as in Turing, it has an entirely different encoding. There are also some Maxwell-specific bugs as well as a few features that have to be implemented differently there. If you're looking to contribute to NVK, helping out with Maxwell support is an excellent area for new contributors.
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