Fedora Linux has officially decided to move exclusively to the Wayland graphical platform for its GNOME desktop environment starting with Fedora 43, scheduled for release in late October or early November.
The decision, recently finalized by Fedora’s Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), a key governing body within the Fedora Project that oversees various technical decisions related to the distro’s development, was made with a clear majority (five votes in favor, two against).
Neal Gompa, the change proposal owner, highlighted that the GNOME X11 session has received minimal testing and very limited development efforts upstream, leading to many unresolved bugs.
Notably, issues with Mutter—GNOME’s window manager—have remained unaddressed, causing significant operational difficulties.
However, as evidenced by the voting, not everyone has welcomed this shift unequivocally. Some community members expressed reservations.
They argue that despite upstream decisions, the GNOME X11 session continues to effectively serve a subset of users, questioning the benefit of removing functional, albeit niche, support.
Despite such concerns, Fedora maintains that aligning its resources with GNOME’s upstream roadmap will enable better quality control and support.
Users who prefer or require X11 will still have alternatives, as Fedora will continue to support other desktop environments like Cinnamon or MATE using login managers such as LightDM.
For more information, here are the voting results. The proposal itself is here.
