14 DAY TRIAL // The Fedora Project is currently working very hard on the next major version of the popular GNU/Linux computer operating system, Fedora 25, bringing you all the latest and modern technologies.
Wayland is a modern technology, the next generation display server designed as a drop-in replacement for the old X.Org Server or X11 as many of you out there might want to call the display server almost all GNU/Linux distributions are currently using by default. But there are many security-released issues with X11 that for some reason can't be fixed, so it's time for the open-source ecosystem to adopt Wayland.
The Wayland adoption has been slowly but steadily growing, especially amongst open source software projects, in particular, those from the GNOME and KDE stacks, but also Enlightenment and other applications that aren't distributed as part of a stack and are actively developed. On the other hand, Canonical is working on their own display server for Ubuntu Linux, called Mir, also as an X11 replacement.
Fedora aims to be a pioneer in the industry, and they wanted to ship Wayland by default for their distribution since Fedora 24, but things were not ready at that moment in time so they had to postpone it. Last week, a new feature proposal popped-up on the Fedora Wiki website, suggesting that the Fedora Workstation edition will ship with the next-generation display server by default for the GNOME desktop environment.
"We will change GDM to use Wayland by default for GNOME. The code will automatically fall back to Xorg in cases where Wayland is unavailable (like nvidia). Users will be able to disable Wayland by setting WaylandEnable=false in /etc/gdm/custom.conf but there will no longer be two separate menu items for GNOME on Wayland and GNOME on X11," reads the proposal.
Visually speaking, users shouldn't notice any major differences between running GNOME on Wayland or on X11. It's all about the fact that the former does a better job at isolating applications from each other and the base system. In other words, Wayland is more secure than X11, which will still be available as a second option on the display manager of Fedora Workstation.
Fedora 25 could arrive on November 15, 2016
Because of major changes like this, and because the Fedora developers are always trying to polish the user experience as much as possible before the final release of the operating system sees the light of day, they have to delay it a few times. The first delay already occurred, and it now looks like the final Fedora 25 release could arrive on November 15, 2016, if no other delays occur during its development cycle, of course.
Right now, we are waiting for the first development milestone, the Alpha build, to be released, which should happen on August 30, 2016. After that, the Beta might land on October 11, and it looks like the Final Freeze stage is currently set for November 1. Until Fedora 25 Alpha is out, you can try the Wayland session right now on your Fedora 24 Linux installation and tell the Fedora devs what you think about it.