Fedora 43 Makes Bold Move: GNOME Desktop Drops X11 Support, Goes All-In on Wayland
Fedora 43 Makes Bold Move: GNOME Desktop Drops X11 Support, Goes All-In on Wayland
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Fedora 43 Makes Bold Move: GNOME Desktop Drops X11 Support, Goes All-In on Wayland
On May 21, tech site Phoronix reported that Fedora’s Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has officially decided to drop X11 support in Fedora 43 for systems using the GNOME desktop environment. Scheduled for release in late October or early November, Fedora 43 will fully adopt the Wayland display protocol.
This change aligns with the GNOME project’s roadmap to phase out X11 session support entirely by the time GNOME 50 is released. In anticipation of that, developer Neal Gompa submitted a proposal in April to begin removing all GNOME X11-related packages from Fedora’s software repositories starting with GNOME 49.
One topic still under discussion by FESCo is whether to maintain support for the GDM (GNOME Display Manager) in non-GNOME desktop spins of Fedora. This would ensure that users of X11-based desktops who do not rely on GNOME are not forced to switch to GDM and can use alternative display managers instead.
For most users, this change will have minimal impact. Fedora 43 will boot directly into a GNOME Wayland session, and GDM will no longer offer an X11 session option. Traditional X11 applications will continue to function normally through Xwayland, so everyday software usage should remain unaffected.
Advanced users who require a native X11 desktop experience will still have options. Fedora continues to support alternative desktop environments such as Cinnamon and MATE, which can be paired with display managers like LightDM.
With Fedora 43 and GNOME 49, the Fedora Project is taking a definitive step into a Wayland-only future.
