Fedora 23 Likely To Pursue Wayland By Default

While Wayland by default replacing the X.Org Server as the default display environment has been talked about for a while within the next-generation Fedora world, it looks like Fedora 23 could finally be the time that the switch happens.

Fedora 23 already has ambitious possibilities like only supporting 64-bit software while one of the more likely proposals is enabling Wayland by default. With Fedora 21, Wayland is shipped with Fedora Workstation as a log-in-time switch for GNOME, but the X.Org Server is still depended upon. With Fedora 22, the Wayland experience will be even better and then for Fedora 23 is when there might be the switch.

Matthias Clasen of Red Hat wrote a new blog post today entitled "GNOME Wayland porting – the endgame." His post shares a number of Wayland features soon appearing in GNOME 3.16 development builds, the gap closing on feature parity to X.Org Servers, etc. An important milestone hoped for with Fedora 22 is to use Wayland for the log-in screen. Using Wayland for GNOME's log-in screen on Fedora should weed out a lot of bugs and expose Wayland to new driver/hardware scenarios.

Following the branching of Fedora 22, they plan to enable the Wayland session by default in Fedora Rawhide, which would mean Wayland is the default in Fedora 23 assuming nothing goes bad in Rawhide. Therefore by the Fedora 23 release due out before the end of the calendar year we could see Wayland-by-default on this major tier-one Linux distribution. Wayland on Fedora 23 would be going head-to-head with Ubuntu 15.10, which could quite possibly ship with Unity 8 + Mir on the desktop. This year should be quite exciting for performance benchmarking and comparison purposes...