Bug 2356977

Summary:	GDM does not present installed awesome WM as option in desktop environment selector
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	W. Michael Petullo <mike>
Component:	awesome	Assignee:	Thomas Moschny <thomas.moschny>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	42	CC:	bhe, ngompa13, thomas.moschny
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Last Closed:	2025-04-02 20:19:02 UTC	Type:	Bug
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Description W. Michael Petullo 2025-04-02 19:09:50 UTC

Description of problem:
After an upgrade to Fedora 42, GDM no longer lists the awesome WM as an option in its desktop environment selector. I suspect this is related to the deprecation of X11.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
gdm-48.0-1.fc42.x86_64
awesome-4.3-19.fc42.x86_64

How reproducible:
Every time

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Boot into GDM.
2. Select a user.
3. Select the desktop environment selector.

Actual results:
The list of options does not include the awesome window manager.

Expected results:
Using awesome as a WM should work.

Additional info:
I copied /usr/share/xsessions/awesome.desktop to /usr/share/wayland-sessions. This caused GDM to display awesome as an option. However, selecting that option and completing the login process produced the following error:

[...]
(nm-applet:18221): Gtk-WARNING **: 13:49:51.933: cannot open display: :0
2025-04-02 13:49:51 E: awesome: main:708: cannot open display (error 1)

Awesome exited after printing this error, and the system returned me to the GDM screen.

Comment 1 Neal Gompa 2025-04-02 20:19:02 UTC

You need to switch to another display manager, as GDM no longer
supports X11 sessions.

One option is SDDM:

$ sudo dnf install sddm
$ sudo systemctl enable --force sddm
$ sudo systemctl reboot

Comment 2 Baoquan He 2026-01-26 15:16:09 UTC

(In reply to Neal Gompa from comment #1)
> You need to switch to another display manager, as GDM no longer
> supports X11 sessions.
> 
> One option is SDDM:
> 
> $ sudo dnf install sddm
> $ sudo systemctl enable --force sddm
> $ sudo systemctl reboot

On my x1 laptop, awesome just hang there after I choose it in the session. When I installed below rpms, I can successfully boot and enter into awesome window manager.


dnf install gnome-session-xession xorg-x11-xinit-session

I searched it from this blog, add it here just in case someone else met this issue too like me.
https://blog.melnib.one/2024/11/30/awesomewm-on-fedora-41/