Canonical Reportedly Not Planning To Enable Wayland-By-Default For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Since the short-lived Ubuntu 17.10 GNOME + Wayland experience, the Ubuntu desktop has still been using the trusted X.Org Server session by default. While Ubuntu 19.04 will soon be shipping and the Ubuntu 19.10 development cycle then getting underway, don't look for any Wayland-by-default change to be around the corner.

Twice in the past week I've received communication from two indicating that Canonical reportedly isn't planning on enabling Wayland-by-default for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. If Canonical were planning to go ahead with Wayland used by default, they would need to make the change for Ubuntu 19.10 as is customary for them to make large changes in the LTS-release-1 version in order to facilitate more widespread testing ahead of the Long Term Support cycle. But Canonical engineers feel that the Wayland support isn't mature enough to enable in the next year for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Understandably, many prominent applications don't yet natively support Wayland or in good enough shape, Fedora isn't even using the Firefox Wayland browser by default now until Fedora 31 later in the year (the web browser state has been a particular poor spot), there still are some gaps in the NVIDIA Wayland coverage, the multi-monitor experience with GNOME on Wayland still has some performance issues, and other lingering challenges remaining while not delivering significant enough user-facing benefits to outweigh the risks involved.

As you can do now on Ubuntu 18.10 and earlier releases, interested users can still switch to the GNOME Wayland session on the Ubuntu desktop, but don't look for Wayland-by-default until at least Ubuntu 20.10.