Fedora Linux 43 beta has been announced. The distro doesn’t support X11 sessions, it’s Wayland only.
This is because GNOME has decided to end support for Xorg. In 2023, when GNOME 45 was released, developers started planning to remove X11.
Since GNOME was removing the old compositor, Fedora decided it was time to do the same. In April 2025, Fedora said it was planning to end support for the X11 package, and this decision was finalized in May. However, in a twist a few weeks ago, it was revealed that the GNOME 49 release candidate had re-enabled X11 support due to some technical issues related to the GNOME Desktop Manager (GDM).
But, this is a temporary change, GNOME plans to disable X11 in a future version, and this could happen as soon as v50. Despite the reversal, Fedora 43 will not support Xorg, with the distro’s developers sticking to the original plan. All GNOME X11 session users will be migrated to Wayland sessions.
fedora 43 Will ship with Python 3.14, Linux Kernel 6.17, KDE 6.4, and RPM 6.0. It will come with Mesa 25.1.4 graphics drivers. Beta builds for Fedora 43 Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, Server, IoT, and Cloud are available for download. Distro’s website. For a full list of technical changes in Fedora 43, please visit official wiki.
phoronics It is reported that the final version of Fedora 43 may be released in late October or early November. X11 is barely maintained, and lacks many features that modern hardware supports such as variable refresh rates, fractional scaling, multiple monitors with HDR. Wayland, on the other hand, is better in almost all aspects, and its support for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs is constantly improving.
Hopefully Mint will get proper Wayland support soon. As a reminder, Linux Mint 22.2 was released in early September. The first alpha of KDE Linux was also released recently. The first beta of Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 is expected to be released this month.
Do you use X11 or Wayland?
