On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 07:55:53PM +0100, Aoife Moloney via devel-announce wrote: > == Benefit to Fedora == > This aligns us with the effort going on upstream to retire the GNOME > X11 session. It also 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 > [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WaylandByDefaultOnNVIDIA it > has been the primary experience for all users (including those with > NVIDIA cards) since Fedora Linux 36]. This continuation of > [[WaylandOnlyGNOMEWorkstationMedia|the work in Fedora Linux 41 to drop > the X11 session from the media]] reaffirms our commitment to the > Wayland GNOME experience in furtherance of the goal to provide the > highest quality GNOME experience through Fedora Workstation.
I find this motivation a bit of a stretch. Firstly, it doesn't really align us with upstream, since we're doing something that upstream is not doing (yet). Secondly, I see little benefit in "aligning" the Workstation Edition with KDE. We have both because they are different. Thirdly, I'm very happy that the WG recommends Wayland and that there's a long history of championing Wayland by Fedora. But this doesn't mean that we should drop support for an alternative. The benefits of dropping code are different for upstreams and for downstreams. For the upstream, dropping an feature like this can result in removing a lot of code, and then possibly they can get rid of some abstraction layers or limitations, also compile times improve, testing is simplified, etc. But for downstreams that aren't developing the code, those benefits are much smaller. The compile times improve a bit, possibly there are less subpackages, but that is just some CPU time. The only big change is that the support matrix is smaller. In the case of the X11 sessions, one has to explicitly select the session. This is something that users who explicitly want it will do. And if they do this, this is most likely because $something doesn't work well under Wayland for them. Maybe it's the fault of their custom config or hardware, that doesn't really matter. But since this is clearly opt-in, whether the feature is there or not does not make that much of a difference for maintainers. I don't personally care for the X11 and I haven't used it in years. But I think that those X11 subpackages and the users who use them are not a problem and there is little benefit in accelerating the removal of X11 before upstream. We had a similar discussion re openssl engines. If upstream drops support for a feature, we'll follow, but there is little benefit to us or our users by doing it before upstream. I'd prefer if we just declare the X11 sessions unsupported and recommend that users switch to the Wayland variant and report any issues, or retest if they are still valid if they were reported previously. Zbyszek -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
