My recent experience with Nvidia proprietary drivers and Wayland has been great. With the latest updates of EGL Wayland (1.1.16+), the performance of the Wayland session it’s on par with the X session and it’s free from visual artifacts and strange behaviours. Games running on Proton on Xwayland run smoothly and I can’t tell the difference between running them this way or under an X session.
As part of the Fedora 41 features, the workstation media will not install the X components by default, resorting to Wayland only. Of course the X components will still be available for install for corner cases (accessibility?), but they will not be installed by default.
To accomodate this, with the latest update of the Nvidia driver from the Nvidia/Multimedia repository it’s now possible to remove the X components and just leave the Wayland part without the need to remove the Nvidia driver as a whole.
There is a new subpackage called xorg-x11-nvidia
which contains the X11 DDX driver, the GLX extension and the default X.org configuration file. This package can be removed along all X.org components and Gnome X session:
$ sudo dnf remove xorg-x11-server-Xorg
Dependencies resolved.
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Package Architecture Version Repository Size
===================================================================================================================
Removing:
xorg-x11-server-Xorg x86_64 1.20.14-35.fc40 @updates 3.6 M
Removing dependent packages:
gnome-session-xsession x86_64 46.0-1.fc40 @fedora 16 k
xorg-x11-drv-amdgpu x86_64 23.0.0-3.fc40 @fedora 186 k
xorg-x11-drv-ati x86_64 19.1.0-11.fc40 @fedora 477 k
xorg-x11-drv-evdev x86_64 2.10.6-15.fc40 @fedora 74 k
xorg-x11-drv-fbdev x86_64 0.5.0-15.fc40 @fedora 34 k
xorg-x11-drv-intel x86_64 2.99.917-57.20210115.fc40 @fedora 2.0 M
xorg-x11-drv-libinput x86_64 1.4.0-2.fc40 @fedora 98 k
xorg-x11-drv-nouveau x86_64 1:1.0.17-7.fc40 @fedora 210 k
xorg-x11-drv-openchrome x86_64 0.6.400-7.20210215git5dbad06.fc40 @fedora 290 k
xorg-x11-drv-qxl x86_64 0.1.6-3.fc40 @fedora 166 k
xorg-x11-drv-vesa x86_64 2.5.0-7.fc40 @fedora 34 k
xorg-x11-drv-vmware x86_64 13.4.0-4.fc40 @fedora 173 k
xorg-x11-drv-wacom x86_64 1.2.2-1.fc40 @updates 1.2 M
Removing unused dependencies:
libXvMC x86_64 1.0.13-5.fc40 @fedora 45 k
mesa-libxatracker x86_64 1:24.1.6-1.fc40 @fedora-multimedia 11 M
nvidia-xconfig x86_64 3:560.35.03-2.fc40 @fedora-multimedia 92 k
xorg-x11-drv-wacom-serial-support x86_64 1.2.2-1.fc40 @updates 40 k
xorg-x11-nvidia x86_64 3:560.35.03-2.fc40 @fedora-multimedia 19 M
xorg-x11-server-common x86_64 1.20.14-35.fc40 @updates 127 k
Transaction Summary
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Remove 20 Packages
Freed space: 38 M
Is this ok [y/N]:
The package xorg-x11-nvidia
itself has reverse dependencies (Supplements) on the main Nvidia driver and X.org server packages, so in case of an install/reinstall of X.org with the Nvidia driver installed, the package gets added to the DNF transaction, making sure you have a working X session at the next login:
$ sudo dnf install xorg-x11-server-Xorg gnome-session-xsession
Last metadata expiration check: 0:36:46 ago on Sun 01 Sep 2024 09:11:59 PM CEST.
Dependencies resolved.
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Package Arch Version Repository Size
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Installing:
gnome-session-xsession x86_64 46.0-1.fc40 fedora 13 k
xorg-x11-server-Xorg x86_64 1.20.14-35.fc40 updates 1.5 M
Installing dependencies:
xorg-x11-drv-libinput x86_64 1.4.0-2.fc40 fedora 50 k
xorg-x11-server-common x86_64 1.20.14-35.fc40 updates 36 k
Installing weak dependencies:
xorg-x11-nvidia x86_64 3:560.35.03-2.fc40 fedora-multimedia 2.3 M
Transaction Summary
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Install 5 Packages
Total download size: 3.9 M
Installed size: 23 M
Is this ok [y/N]:
All of this can be already performed on a Fedora 40 system. Just login using the standard “GNOME Session” (Wayland) and then remove the xorg-x11-server-Xorg
package.
Did you try Firefox without X? For me it keeps crashing in Wayland. I had to do this: # cat /etc/environment
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0
NVD_BACKEND=direct