Fedora 41 to Transfer Anaconda Installer to Wayland

Fedora 41 proposes a significant change to its installer, transferring it to Wayland and removing X11 packages from GNOME assemblies.

Fedora, the popular Linux distribution, has proposed a significant change in its upcoming release, Fedora 41. The distribution plans to transfer the Anaconda installer to the Wayland protocol from the current X11 protocol. This change will impact the installer’s capabilities, including remote installation processes and keyboard control mechanisms.

The proposed change to Wayland will affect the remote installation process, which currently relies on the TigerVNC VNC client tied to X11. Instead, the distribution plans to use the grd (Gnome Remote Desktop) application based on the RDP protocol. This change will enable remote installation over a more secure and efficient protocol.

Another noticeable change will be the reworking of the keyboard control processes. Currently, Anaconda uses the libXklavier library to configure the keyboard layout, which will be discontinued in GNOME Shell. As a result, the libxklavier package will be removed from Fedora. Due to the binding to libXklavier, the ability to switch keyboard layouts is disabled in the installer used in Wayland-based Live builds. To overcome this limitation, the distribution plans to use the systemd-localed service instead of libXklavier to change layouts, accessing it via D-Bus.

In addition to migrating the installer to Wayland, Fedora also plans to stop shipping X11-related GNOME packages in Fedora Workstation builds. While the packages will remain in the repository, they will no longer be included in installation and Live media built on GNOME. These changes aim to reduce maintenance effort and free up resources that can be used to improve the quality of the modern graphics stack.

That said, these proposals have not yet been approved by the FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), which is responsible for the technical part of the development of the Fedora distribution. However, the committee had previously approved the removal of 41 X11 sessions for GNOME from the basic Fedora distribution.

The main reason for deprecating X11 support in Fedora is the deprecation of the X.Org server in RHEL 9 and the decision to remove it completely in a future major release of RHEL 10. The appearance of Wayland support in proprietary NVIDIA drivers and the replacement of the fbdev drivers in Fedora 36 with the simpledrm driver, which works correctly with Wayland, are also contributing factors to leaving only Wayland support.

Via Fedora mailing list

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