NixOS config shows X11 but I am running Wayland - what is going on?

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1

I am running the NixOS demo appliance in VirtualBox.

I successfully switched the desktop environment from Plasma to Gnome. Here are some key lines from my configuration.nix:

services.xserver.displayManager.gdm.enable = true;
services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome.enable = true;

That works. But with “xserver” that would lead me to believe it has Gnome on X11 installed yet as you can see in the output from the command below, I am running Wayland not X11:

$ loginctl show-session 1 --property Type
Type=Wayland

I am clearly running Wayland. So why does the NixOS configuration suggest otherwise? Can someone kindly account for this discrepancy?

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It’s just a legacy name that nobody got around to changing yet.

s/xserver/graphical-desktop/ if you want.

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Interesting. I took a look at that GitHub issue and seems to me that the Xorg nomenclature is just legacy. I suppose when Wayland is more mature and Xorg is finally dead - - which could take a year or two (or who knows how long really) - - ‘wayland’ will be refactored and be more clearly reflected in configuration files in NixOS but prolly in other distros too. Thanks for the link.

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Ideally we’d use a more abstract name than binding our API to one specific graphical desktop specification again.

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