Looks Like Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) May Ship with Wayland by Default

Ubuntu 21.04

The Ubuntu Desktop team announced today that the upcoming Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) operating system may ship with the Wayland display server enabled by default.

Ubuntu developer Sebastien Bacher unveiled earlier in a short announcement that the Ubuntu Desktop team is considering moving to a display server using the next-generation Wayland protocol by default instead of the more vulnerable X.Org Server.

This isn’t Canonical’s first attempt to enable Wayland by default in its popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, but it might just be the right time since many bugs and blockers were resolved since Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) four years ago, such as desktop sharing, which now appears to work well under Wayland.

“We believe now is the right time to try again, it should give us enough time before the next LTS to get proper feedback and sort out issues,” said developer Sebastien Bacher.

As you can imagine, this comes as great news for Ubuntu users after Canonical announced last week that Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) won’t ship with the upcoming GNOME 40 desktop environment due to its major shell redesign, making many users unhappy.

Therefore, sticking with the GNOME 3.38 desktop by default will make the Wayland transition easier for the Ubuntu Desktop team. However, it would appear that those who own a computer with an NVIDIA GPU will be defaulted to X.Org Server instead of Wayland, for now.

Current Ubuntu releases like Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) offer a Wayland session, which you can choose from the login screen after installation, so if you want to help the Ubuntu devs improve it for Ubuntu 21.04, now it’s the time to report bugs and other issues you’ve encountered with the Wayland session.

You can report your Ubuntu on Wayland experiences here. The final release of Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) is currently set for April 22, 2021, but a public beta version should be ready for testing on April Fool’s Day.

Last updated 3 years ago

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