This is a convolution of two questions, I apologize.
Here’s the thing: I have an installation of openSUSE Tumbleweed, I went with the defaults for Gnome during installation. As expected, that gives me two entries in the GDM login screen, where I can chose my DE for login: “Gnome” and “Gnome on Xorg” (besides IceWM, which happens to exist twice, but that’s probably another question).
My understanding was, that if I chose “Gnome” over “Gnome on Xorg”, I’ll be set to a Wayland session. I was hence surprised to see, that in this new “Wayland” session, X (/usr/bin/7) pops up. Question one: How can I find out, whether I am on a Wayland or an X11 session? The only thing I could find is echo-ing $XDG_SESSION_TYPE; This yields “x11” in either case – however, it is unclear to me whether that is an appropriate way to gauge the session type.
But, at least, it is puzzling that I seem to never get a Wayland session, even though this is the documented default on openSUSE now. (I must admit that I could not really give a good answer if you asked me “who cares, it works, be happy!”, but that’s not the point, geekos!). Question two: Does any one know why I get X11? Is this a bug (… maybe the same that makes IceWM appear twice??), or does s.th. technically prevent Wayland (I’m on a rather new ThinkPad 13, with i7-7500U/IntelHD-620)?
With recently installed Tumbleweed, I find that I need to install another package before I can get Gnome to run on Wayland.
I’m not sure of the package name. And I’m on Leap 42.3 right now, so I can’t check.
Using Yast Software Management, search for “wayland”. Look for a package with a name similar to “gnome-wayland-session” or “gnome-session-wayland”. Install that. Then you might still need to reboot before you can get it to work.