Fedora Rawhide Enables Wayland By Default, Where Supported

Seven years after announcing Wayland and three years since Wayland 1.0, Fedora developers are preparing to be the first tier-one desktop Linux distribution to use it by default for supported drivers/hardware.

Ray Strode of Red Hat is pushing into Fedora's Rawhide development repository new versions of GNOME-Session, GDM, GNOME-Shell, and Mutter that change the session code. No longer is GNOME Wayland going to be a log-in screen option, but instead will be enabled by default if Wayland is supported by the system. If it's not, it will fallback to using an X.Org Server instead. Right now the fallback will still happen until NVIDIA and AMD Catalyst proprietary drivers support Wayland or if you're on a system without a DRM/KMS driver. The user also has the option of disabling Wayland via the /etc/gdm/custom.conf.

Up to now on recent Fedora releases the GNOME Wayland desktop has just been a menu option.

The change in the Fedora Rawhide development repository is coming now to ensure wide-spread testing in time for the next Fedora release. Fedora 24 is planning for Wayland by default should no issues come up before its planned release in May.

News of this change was posted to the Fedora devel list. Already the default change is raising some concern. David Airlie of Red Hat commented he would prefer waiting for Wayland sessions until it is feature equivalent to X: there's still open bugs, NVIDI Optimus systems aren't working, USB monitor hot-plugging doesn't work on Wayland yet, and Mutter shouldn't require XWayland running for native GNOME applications.