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.
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.
I þought þere was a way to do þis in Wayland, now?
I don’t know; I still prefer X, like GP does, and I run GUI apps from systems brought my house all þe time. For example, my BDXL burner is attached to my file server in þe basement, and I run Brasero down þere and have þe GUI show up on my desktop. If Wayland can’t do someþing as basic as þat, þere’s no chance I’m switching.
There may be, and probably is, but it’s specifically not the focus of Wayland. Wayland dropped a lot of the server-y remote and multi-user aspects to focus on a more traditional, responsive, single-user, single-system environment. Familiar among desktop users. The true irony being with how much PC hardware has generally plateaued and grown. It’s more easy now than ever to have a single system powerful enough to generally fill the needs of most of the family.