#183 Wayland as SLFO only graphical display technology
Opened 6 months ago by lkocman. Modified 3 months ago

(Clone of internal tracker PED-1721)

We should drop Xorg server from SLFO and only ship Wayland for graphical display, to ensure we don't have to maintain Xorg server for the lifetime of SLFO.

X11 applications compatibility should be still available.

Wayland based desktop features set should be identical to X11 based desktop.


Metadata Update from @lkocman:
- Custom field SUSE Jira - SUSE Linux Enterprise adjusted to https://jira.suse.com/browse/PED-1721

6 months ago

The target for now is SLES 15 Public Beta, which translates to Leap 16.0 Beta ~= April/May 2025

We should drop Xorg server from SLFO

Does this mean you'll branch the XOrg server from Factory to Backports, instead?


desktop features set should be identical to X11 based desktop

It's not fully ready yet, e.g. one major issue in Plasma is that on session restore window positions are not remembered (which might not matter to a hobbyist, but is very annoying in any business or professional setting Leap might otherwise be ideal for): https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues

In addition, there are lots of smaller desktops apart from Plasma and GNOME (one of the differentiating features of openSUSE!) which are not ready yet to run on Wayland. Will they simply be dropped, too?

Most of the desktops in Factory have Wayland offerings now.

Offhand, the following have Wayland sessions available:

  • KDE Plasma
  • GNOME
  • LXQt
  • Xfce
  • Cinnamon
  • Pantheon
  • MATE

"Wayland session" might not be the right term here for some of those, "Experimental Wayland session" might be better fitting. However, I don't think "experimental" is what Leap users are looking for, TBH.

Also, it would be helpful to list desktops, window managers and applications which will be dropped (unless XOrg is taken from Factory instead), rather than those which are kept.

Most of the desktops in Factory have Wayland offerings now.

Offhand, the following have Wayland sessions available:

  • KDE Plasma
  • GNOME
  • LXQt
  • Xfce
  • Cinnamon
  • Pantheon
  • MATE

Correction: MATE for Wayland is currently unavailable. And Wayland is still experimental on Cinnamon.

The desktop team is targeting SLES 16 Beta 3 for feature completeness on the Wayland side. Beta 3 is aiming for the first week in April.

We don't care how SLE will do. But on community side, Leap 16 is not ready to drop xorg. Many DEs don't support Wayland or are only experimental.

Metadata Update from @Pharaoh_Atem:
- Issue tagged with: SLE, SLE-Accepted

3 months ago

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