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.
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.
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.
It is possible on both GNOME and KDE iirc. I never use that feature, but i am sure i saw it in the settings.
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.