Although Wayland has been GNOME’s default session since 2016, X11 has continued to linger in the codebase—until now. That changed with the recent merging of two PRs (here and here), which completely removed the X11 codebase from both Mutter, GNOME’s default window manager and compositor, as well as the GNOME Shell itself.
In other words, the GNOME project is finally closing one of the longest chapters in Linux desktop history. With the upcoming GNOME 50 release, scheduled for mid-march 2026, the desktop environment will officially drop support for the native X11 session, making Wayland the sole display system moving forward.
While I have always found GNOME to be extremely limiting and highly opinionated, I don’t mind this change. Wayland has improved quite a bit and will only get better with time, x11 is an aging standard. It’s natural that it will eventually be dropped in favor of a new one. Wayland too will be in this position as another display server replaces it as well.
For me the X11 era continues for now (until the next version of xfce I expect) and the era of GNOME ended 23 years ago.
I still have issues with wayland when using extensions inside other software that aren’t compatible with wayland. They tend not to work even with xwayland. Well, I hope compatibility improves until I need to update…
Have repeatedly run into issues with Wayland. Have gotten it to do some obscure things I haven’t gotten X11 to do but I don’t need those things. It has failed to do things I need. Maybe it is time to give it another shot but it has been a major downgrade for a long time in my lived experience.
If you want to serve displays to multiple systems. Wayland will never do that. Honestly I’m not sure it even properly supports serving different displays to multiple users on the same system well. And I don’t think they are planning on it.
It’s a really niche paradigm anymore. Remote displays being handled by RDP or something like rust desk. Multiple users handled by hypervisors. Sure it is a bit of a waste of hardware resources. But on the other hand it allows things to be a bit simpler and more secure.
I absolutely have fond memories of setting up a multi seat display server that could access over the internet. Running a full gnome session acessable in Windows. Through the cygwin utilities and windows X client in college 27 years ago.
Do you have some examples for someone who has basically no idea about linux?
I’m on GNOME 42 with X11. Wayland kills mouse gestures, apparently, because there’s no way to know which window is focused, or which window the mouse is hovering on. At least, not as easily as with X11.
So I’m not sure where I’ll go after this. Mouse gestures per window is an extremely important feature to me. Doesn’t help that easystroke has been abandoned for years.
KDE has an idea thread about it, but no one is working on it.
Yeah accessibility features tend to be last in line. The good news is that getting rid of x11 will put a fire under people to get it done.
Don’t know about the other things but “focus follows mouse” is possible on Wayland. Well, it’s possible on river at least, not sure about KDE or GNOME. Could be a wlroots related feature though.
