No option to switch from xorg to Wayland on Ubuntu 17.10 login

Question

I don't see the gear button next to the Sign in button at the login screen. I have Nvidia drivers installed (for Nvidia 730 GT card). Ubuntu boots into Xorg as seen from the terminal with echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE which outputs x11.

How do I switch to Wayland?

Solution 1

That means Wayland is disabled by your hardware and choice of drivers for it. You need to switch to nouveau to get Wayland working.

You might face this issue once you do it: GNOME has grey bar on top and bottom after upgrade from 17.04 to 17.10, how do I fix it to how it's supposed to look?

Solution 2

That means Wayland is disabled by your hardware.

Thanks, I did read on Didier Rocks that Wayland is disabled and falls back by default when proprietary Nvidia drivers are used. – user299070 yesterday

I am not a huge fan of the Linux Nvidia drivers*, but once in a while I try them to check the performance of the machine. More often than not, I end up in a console and no X/Wayland.

I have seen some Ubuntu users reinstalling their machine after this f* up, so here's how to fix it (I always forget the initramfs step and end up wasting a lot of time):

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-*
$ sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_pre-nvidia
$ sudo update-initramfs -u
$ reboot

Comments

[surya_hs]

Thanks, I did read on Didier Rocks that Wayland is disabled and falls back by default when proprietary Nvidia drivers are used.

[Ganesh Krishnan]

This works absolutely flawlessly. Thank you! The correct answer is what you are saying: nvidia messes up wayland and ubuntu disables wayland and offer only X11.