Surprised this wasn’t mentioned, but OpenSuse Tumbleweed still ships with X11 as default.
Now THAT’S interesting… Tumbleweed is a PG recommended OS
Meanwhile, we maintain criteria that reads:
Avoids X11, as its last major release was more than a decade ago
If Tumbleweed currently uses X11, it seems either:
- X11 criteria is not strong, should be removed
- Tumbleweed should not be recommended, or
- An additional ‘exception’ note is needed, similar to Qubes’
At any rate, immediate action seems needed - PG currently recommends an OS that violates its own criteria
I spent a few hours today learning about Tumbleweed, in an effort to answer this question; I think you’re on the right track
OpenSUSE lets users customize their desktop environment during installation. Of the three main flavors (GNOME, KDE, Xfce), it seems only Xfce still depends on X11. KDE and GNOME both support Wayland & allow it as default
So while I find it noteworthy that Tumbleweed is broadly recommended by PG without any nuance towards preferred configuration, users can indeed run it and still ‘avoid x11’
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Having an xfce flavor as a download option shouldn’t be a criteria for exclusion. Having an x11 installation option shouldn’t be politicized. If PG wants to give a Wayland recommendation, it should state what DEs to choose from. Tumbleweed is a great distro form what I’ve heard and their out of the box experience matches how i configure Linux.
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Sure, I don’t disagree with any of this
Are you sure about this ? I use KDE and I am on X11. I don’t think I manually installed it.
They support it, but I don’t think Tumbleweed KDE defaults to Wayland.
Correct. Some of those are provided for legacy reasons.
We did that in the past, but its something that changes regularly especially with smaller environments. While we didn’t explicitly suggest it, we would suggest GNOME or KDE (both of those are comitted to gutting out x11 stuff) or something mainstream that has development resources.
We say this for Fedora Atomic Distros right now, so it’s already a thing we do:
As with the recommendation to avoid X11 in our criteria for Linux distributions, we recommend avoiding flavors that support only the legacy X11 window system.
I think we should add a similar note for Tumbleweed seeing as Xfce is one of the three default choices at Installation Quick Start | Start-Up | openSUSE Leap 15.6 out of the box, and probably also add a (for example, Xfce) note to be clear.
However, we should also double check whether KDE defaults to X11 currently on Tumbleweed. GNOME can’t, but KDE still supports the option until next year IIRC.
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I think it does. I just checked with a Live ISO and it defaults to X11.
At least one Fedora edition—Cinnamon also ships with X11.
Cinnamon is a spin, not an edition. The distinction might seem silly, but I think it is on those grounds that we don’t actually worry about that.
Image from the bottom of https://fedoraproject.org/
The only two desktop editions are Workstation (GNOME) and the more recent KDE Plasma. (though I have no issue with us doing similarly for the Cinnamon spin, personally)
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