Notice about GNOME Edition

alfisya

In the upcoming sync, GNOME 49 will land in stable (Polaris) repository. With that, GNOME will only offers Wayland session. The "GNOME on Xorg" login option will no longer present by default. This decision is motivated by upstream GNOME’s roadmap, and our own testing.

Solus GNOME Edition has been Wayland by default since 4.4 release. Upstream GNOME has decided to phase out the X11 support in version 49 by disabling it at build time. We intended to keep Xorg session in GNOME 49 to provide leeway for users not yet on Wayland, yet, our testing of the Xorg session shows that it is not working well. It receives virtually no testing or bug fixes by upstream GNOME. So, we instead decide to subpackage the Xorg session to a new gnome-session-shell-x11 package and warn that it is DEPRECATED in its description.

That being said, we believe that the Wayland experience has matured significantly. It does not matter much if you have AMD, NVIDIA or Intel GPU. People can still run X11-only programs via Xwayland. Even wine now can run on Wayland (not by default). There has been so much progress that we feel that this decision will not affect much of the experience of using GNOME on Solus.

User Impact

Users will notice the login screen (GDM) will no longer offer the "GNOME on Xorg" option (or any option at all, if you don't have any other DE or WM installed).
We urge users that need X11/Xorg to consider moving to different edition instead. KDE, Xfce and Budgie still support X11.
Users that still need "GNOME on Xorg" session can install gnome-session-shell-x11 to add it back.
Beware that the "GNOME on Xorg" session is quite broken in our testing :
- On multi-monitor setups, you cannot switch the primary monitor
- Flicker/Glitch on Application overview
- Some extensions can cause even more buggy animation

Next steps

Report any bug you encounter on our issue tracker or the GNOME issue tracker. This will help us make a better experience for you.

Upstream GNOME plans to remove the X11 component completely by GNOME 50. So, distribution cannot reverse that decision without forking the GNOME project.

Read more about the reason behind this decision from various sources in the Linux community:

That is all and thank you. Cheers!

brent

alfisya Upstream Gnome plans to remove the X11 component completely by Gnome 50. So, distribution cannot reverse that decision without forking the Gnome project.

that was the direction it was always heading so right on schedule.

alfisya We urge users that need X11/Xorg to consider moving to different edition instead. KDE, Xfce and Budgie still support X11.

Josh is dropping X11 for Budgie so look forward to where that goes too. I've tried all DEs and budgie still does it for me.

@alfisya thanks for all the discussion link. clear as a bell from Gnome:
"If you are a distributor, please try to not change the default or at least let us (or me directly) know why you’d need to still ship the X11 session."

It's a full moon tonight 🙂 so bring on the changes

Sebastian

Question: Fedora 42 had initially also removed X11 support for GDM itself. Meaning that not only there was no GNOME X11 session anymore, but you couldn't even login to any X11 session via GDM anymore. So if you had several DE's installed, GDM would only show and allow to login to wayland sessions. After protest, this was revoked for Fedora 42.
How is Solus handling this? Is there still support for logging in to X11 sessions via GDM?
So, if you would install let's say Budgie additionally to GNOME to preserve X11 access just in case, would you need to switch login manager?

Harvey

Sebastian
As the post stated we have a separate, optional package gnome-session-shell-x11 for x11 sessions on Gnome 49 so of course GDM has x11 support enabled. However GDM is a Gnome project so come Gnome 50 I have no doubt that functionality will no longer be available.

alfisya

Sebastian How is Solus handling this? Is there still support for logging in to X11 sessions via GDM?

GDM still support launching other X11 session. I tested it with Budgie installed alongside GNOME and it still works. So, rest assured that the functionality is still here (for now 😛).