Can't find Wayland sessions on GDM

Question

I have Kubuntu 19.10 installed and then I installed gnome through apt thus having sddm and gdm3, my problem is that on gdm3 on the login screen I can only select plasma or ubuntu but can't find Wayland options while when I enable sddm I can select plasma, plasma on Wayland, ubuntu, ubuntu on Wayland. I tried editing: /etc/gdm3/custom.conf by commenting out WaylandEnable=false

#WaylandEnable=false

and also tried setting it to true same behavior

WaylandEnable=true

I have an iGPU and a dedicated Nvidia GPU running with the proprietary driver, selecting intel or nvidia through prime-select doesn't change anything and the Wayland sessions on both plasma and ubuntu work as expected through sddm

Edit: this question No option to switch from xorg to Wayland on Ubuntu 17.10 login isn't the same as mine because their response is that Wayland isn't compatible with the hardware but if I start Wayland session manually before logging in using :

XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session gnome-session

the gnome Wayland session starts fine, my only problem is that I can't find it listed when pressing the gear icon on gdm

Solution

Posting @doug 's comment as answer.

Wayland is disabled by gnome devs on nvidia proprietery drivers due to instability of GLX applications with that recipe. You can manually remove or comment the DRIVER=="nvidia" rule at /lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules

See comment here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdm/-/merge_requests/46

Update Dec-2021

Since nvidia improved wayland support this is now pretty stable. gdm 41 has updated rules to reflect this.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdm/-/merge_requests/155

On mainline distros for now, wayland should work fine, Just make sure you have nvidia proprietary >= 470 and modeset enabled.

You might still have to tweak the udev rule if your distro is on older gnome and doesn't tweak it for you.

Comments

[user535733]

Does this answer your question? No option to switch from xorg to Wayland on Ubuntu 17.10 login

[DK Bose]

• Could you expand on "I installed gnome through apt"? What was the exact command? • While troubleshooting quite often isn't an easy task, things are even more complicated when certain desktop environments are present at the same time. • While you don't seem to have problems with Wayland during your Plasma session, Wayland was still seen as experimental at the time Kubuntu 19.10 was released. AFAIK, Wayland will not be the default even in Kubuntu 20.04.

[guiverc]

if you don't remember, you can look through logs (/var/log/apt/history.log; personally I view using using view but less or other tools work too) assuming it doesn't show in your command history

[Elias Teeny]

I found the command in the apt logs: apt-get install gnome-shell

[doug]

If nvidia drivers are installed then gdm will blacklist Wayland session. You could edit the file that causes this though you can't use nvidia drivers in a Wayland session. /lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules, I.e comment out last line.

[hknust]

@doug. Thank you, that was the missing piece. I had commented out the line in /etc/gdm3/custom.conf and added nvidia-drm.modeset=1 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub but was not able to able to switch to Wayland at log in time. FWIW, I tried Wayland for a few minutes and then went back to X11 since the performance was terrible.

[hackel]

@doug Please submit your solution as a proper answer to this question so it can be accepted. I've been searching for this answer for some time!