It's been a while since my last post. Busy "days" this year ... Anyway, here's a quick tip because it took me some time to figure it out and there wasn't much help on the Internet.

Restore Gnome on X11 session

If you find yourself in the situation where (suddenly) your Gnome desktop would only run on Wayland and there is no longer any entry regarding X11 to choose from before you log in then it might help to simply do sudo apt install gnome-session-xsession. You should be able to select Gnome on X11 then again from the available sessions. To get that list, enter your user name and then click on the gear symbol.

Why stay with X11?

Why not use Wayland you might ask? After all, with Gnome 47 a release appeared that could fully be compiled without any X11 support. It's now totally optional!

But for me, there are some reasons to stick with X11:

• Google Chrome has very poor performance under Wayland. It's barely usable (at least for me).
• I am very fond of plank. That's a nice fish-eyed task bar but it has no support for Wayland!
• There's no such thing as xkill in Wayland to simply get rid of broken GUIs.
• I use autokey a lot for all sorts of quick key combinations. Doesn't work on Wayland, either.

So, I'll stick with X11 for a bit longer. Maybe there some nice replacements I do not know of, yet. I'd be happy to read about them in the comments :-)