Fedora has been a frontrunner in adopting Wayland as the platform has been the primary experience since Fedora Linux 36. However, until now, X11 support has always been part of the distribution’s ISO installation images. But with Fedora 41, this is set to change.
The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), a key governing body within the Fedora Project that oversees various technical decisions related to the distro’s development, unanimously decided, with all voting in favor, that the upcoming Fedora Workstation 41, set for release in late October, will exclusively feature Wayland, sidelining the older X11 packages for GNOME.
The decision to focus solely on Wayland for GNOME follows the deprecation of X11 support upstream. The change aligns Fedora with ongoing efforts to modernize and streamline user experiences across its platforms. And right off the bat, we make an important clarification for all die-hard X11 fans.
Although the GNOME X11 packages will no longer come pre-installed, they will remain accessible in the repositories maintained by the GNOME Special Interest Group and the Workstation Working Group for those who wish to install them manually.
In other words, users who do upgrades between major Fedora releases will still have Xorg, as it remains available through in-place upgrades. At the same time, for those with fresh Fedora 41 installations, adding Xorg will require manual installation of the necessary packages (“gnome-session-xsession” and “gnome-classic-session-xsession“).
For users, the transition to a Wayland-only GNOME Workstation means a cleaner, more efficient environment that leverages the latest developments in graphical display technology. Additionally, with the introduction of the NVIDIA 555 display driver that includes explicit sync support, Wayland has become much more enjoyable and efficient than X11.
For more information on Fedora 41’s decision to completely remove X11, see the proposal itself and the FESCo voting result.
