Howard Gibson via Talk said on Mon, 2 Mar 2026 01:06:07 -0500
I have just installed Fedora 43 on my old laptop. Fedora 43 no longer provides X11.
Leave it to Redhat to eliminate choice.
On the GDM login window, there is no longer a way to select window managers so that I can launch the FVWM I have been running since 1995, I think.
Leave it to Redhat to eliminate choice.
X11 support will be phased out of future Fedora distributions. Apparently X11 is buggy, and no one wants to maintain it.
Leave it to Redhat to use the "buggy/we won't maintain" excuse for eliminating choices. If they're so allergic to "buggy", why do they insist on their pet systemd?
I have spent the last thirty years making FVWM behave exactly the way I want it to. Now, I have to figure out Gnome_4, which I do not particularly like. Maybe I should look at KDE again.
Not a chance. You should switch to a distro that encourages choice, DIY, and customizing your workflow. Don't blame FVWM for this. Think about it this way: How many times are you going to kiss the ring when Redhat says "my way or the highway?"
There appears to be no way to set up GDM to launch alternate X11 window managers. In the distant past, I have used SDDM to work around GDM's antics, but if X11 is being phased out completely...
It's phased out of one family tree of distros.
What happens to X11 applications?
In what timeframe? Eventually, as Wayland finally becomes capable, there will be a slow switch to Wayland, and most applications will, on their own schedules, make the transition. If you mean in the next 5 years, I predict that X11 will still be with us and strongly supported. But not in the Redhat world, because Redhat.
I am using LaTeX to prepare documents,
LaTeX is a CLI application, not an issue. By the way, look at LuaTeX and LuaLaTeX. I like them better.
and I use Xfig to do graphics. Xfig files can be converted to PostScript, PDF, and PNG from shell scripts and makefiles, so it supports web pages as well as LaTeX. I am using Xreader to read PDF files. I used to use Xpdf. Are there any other X11 applications people insist on running?
You can run xfig on Wayland using XWayland. Inkscape is developing a Wayland direct interface, but in 2026 best stability for Inkscape is Xwayland. Bottom line: The slow march away from X11 is not a problem if you don't use a deliberately problematic distro. Red Hat and its descendants, for instance. SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com