Changes/WaylandOnlyGNOMEWorkstationMedia

Wayland-only GNOME Workstation Media

This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

Summary

Remove the GNOME X11 packages from the Fedora Workstation media. The packages will remain available in the repositories maintained by the GNOME SIG, but not preinstalled on the media anymore.

Owner

• Name: Neal Gompa
• Email: ngompa13@gmail.com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 41
• Last updated: 2024-06-03
• [Announced]
• [<will be assigned by the Wrangler> Discussion thread]
• FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

As part of the upstream deprecation and effort to remove X11 support from GNOME, Fedora Workstation media will no longer include the GNOME X11 packages. The packages will remain in the repository (maintained by the GNOME SIG/Workstation WG) for users to manually install at this time.

Benefit to Fedora

This aligns us with the effort going on upstream to deprecate and retire the GNOME X11 session. It also partly aligns us with Fedora KDE. Like the Fedora KDE SIG, the Fedora Workstation WG recommends and supports the Wayland platform for graphics.

Fedora Workstation has a long history of developing and promoting the Wayland experience for GNOME, and it has been the primary experience for all users (including those with NVIDIA cards) since Fedora Linux 36. This reaffirms our commitment to the Wayland GNOME experience in furtherance of the goal to provide the highest quality GNOME experience through Fedora Workstation.

Scope

• Proposal owners: Drop the GNOME X11 packages from the GNOME groups in comps and replace them with their Wayland counterparts. Pull request: pagureio#fedora-comps#972

• Other developers: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Release engineering: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Alignment with the Fedora Strategy: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Systems upgrading from older releases of Fedora Workstation will not be impacted, as this only affects new installs.

Early Testing (Optional)

Not applicable to this change.

How To Test

Not applicable to this change, as we're only dropping a non-default experience from the media.

User Experience

Going forward until the X11 session packages are fully dropped, users will need to manually install them from the repository if they need it.

Dependencies

Not applicable for this change.

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: Revert the comps change
• Contingency deadline: Final freeze
• Blocks release? Yes.

Documentation

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Release Notes

Fedora Workstation no longer pre-installs the deprecated GNOME X11 session for new installations. Users who wish to add it back can do so by installing the gnome-session-xsession and gnome-classic-session-xsession packages.