Fedora Wayland – Fedora 25 Not Using Wayland by Default

fedoralinuxwaylandx11

For some reason my Fedora 25 FRESH install is not using wayland by default. I know this because of

$: loginctl show-session 3 -p Type
Type=x11

If I was using Wayland by default that should say wayland or weston. I'm very confused why this fresh install of fedora 25 is not sporting wayland by default. I looked over the arch wiki briefly, and tried to test run wayland by issuing

$: weston

Also, I have rebooted fedora to multiuser.target, to get just a command line to manually launch a dbus-run-session for wayland, and this is the output:

$: dbus-run-session -- gnome-shell --display-server --wayland
(gnome-shell:1372): mutter-WARNING **: Can't initialize KMS backend: could not find drm kms device

Then I tried:

$: startx

And my standard gnome desktop popped up no problem. I'm seriously wondering if fedora 25 live installer ever installed wayland to begin with?

After looking for the wayland config file weston.ini, I cannot find it in ~/.config/ where it's supposed to be.

System info:

$:uname -a
Linux sark 4.8.10-300.fc25.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Nov 21 18:49:16 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I have done a full system update on first login with

$: sudo dnf update
  • Also went through the process of using the nvidia drivers for my graphics card; GTX 950
  • Not using the default pre-my-move-to-nvidia-driver driver 😛

EDIT:

After investigating onto my laptop, my Laptop reports that it is using wayland:

$: loginctl show-session 2 -p Type
Type=wayland

This laptop was a fedora24 upgrade to fedora25, not a fresh install of fedora 25

Laptop info:

$: uname -a
Linux mcp 4.8.10-300.fc25.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Nov 21 18:59:16 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Best Answer

Nvidia does not yet support Wayland, so Fedora 25 falls back to X11. From the Nvidia forum I see someone has used packages from the in-development Fedora 26 plus some patches to get it working, but notes "I have tested it with local builds and it runs like crap, personally I wouldn't bother trying it in F25."

Hopefully this will be resolved for F26. In the meantime, I'm at least glad that the X11 fallback worked nicely and transparently.