Fedora maintainers have decided to drop X11 in Fedora 41 Workstation, no longer installing the aging windowing system in favor of Wayland.

Linux distros and desktop environments have been moving toward Wayland, X11’s more modern and secure replacement for years, with the last year seeing a marked acceleration. Fedora has long had a reputation of pushing new technologies forward, and already defaults to Wayland, so it’s no surprise that it would be among the first to stop installing X11 by default.

The change was proposed on the Fedora working group mailing list by Jens Petersen:

I was wondering if we should not stop installing gnome-session-xsession by default in F40 Workstation. I guess if we want to do that it should really happen before the Beta release.
Alternatively it could be done more formally as a Fedora Change for F41, and first in Rawhide.

After quite a bit of discussion, it was decided that Fedora 40’s release was too close to make such a big change, so it was pushed to Fedora 41, as Peterson confirmed two days ago:

Fedora Workstation WG discussed this today and we agreed we should do this for Fedora 41,
since it is really too late already for F40 and it should really be handled as a System Wide Change anyway.

Those whose workflows still depend on X11 will be able to install it from the repos.