GNOME Moves On: What the End of the X11 Session Means

Just days after KDE developer Nate Graham shared an update on the future of X11 in the Plasma desktop, GNOME developer Jordan Petridis has followed suit. In a new post, he offers insight into what users can expect once the X11 session is removed in the upcoming GNOME 49 release, scheduled for October.

First things first: Xorg isn’t being abandoned outright. It remains maintained and is receiving necessary security patches and bug fixes. However, active development has effectively halted, with most of its original contributors now focused on Wayland.

The consensus among developers is clear—X11’s architectural limitations make further progress impractical without breaking compatibility.

That said, distributions aren’t dropping Xorg packages anytime soon. Traditional X11-based desktops will keep working, and XWayland ensures that older applications continue to run seamlessly under Wayland. So, while GNOME and KDE are moving on, users of other environments need not panic.

According to Petridis, the decision to remove X11 support didn’t happen overnight. During GNOME 46’s development cycle, maintainers gathered feedback and addressed lingering issues. By version 48, critical accessibility improvements—funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund—had closed the functionality gap between X11 and Wayland.

The final call was made after multiple discussions within the GNOME Release Team and coordination with major distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora. Ubuntu’s confirmation in early June solidified the plan, leading to the official removal in GNOME 49.

June 1st I started working on a, earlier than usual, 49.alpha release and 3 days later I got a private confirmation that Ubuntu would indeed follow along with completely disabling the Xorg session for 49, matching the upstream defaults.

The timing aligns strategically with Ubuntu 25.10 and avoids delaying the change until the next long-term support release.

Okay, but what about compatibility? The good news is that most applications already support Wayland natively. For those that don’t, XWayland acts as a seamless bridge, ensuring they run without user intervention. Meanwhile, Wayland itself offers tangible improvements—better performance, security, and modern features that X11 simply can’t match.

Regarding accessibility, Petridis mentions that critics argued that Wayland wasn’t ready, but developers have worked extensively to ensure assistive technologies like Orca not only match X11’s capabilities but surpass them, moving away from the “duct-taped hacks” of the past.

Lastly, the blog post mentions that while some niche workflows may still rely on X11, the vast majority of users won’t notice a difference, or may even see improvements. The transition has been years in the making, and with major distributions on board, the Linux desktop ecosystem is finally turning the page.

For more information, see Petridis’s post on the GNOME Blog.

Just a quick note for any readers who might’ve missed the news: with major Linux distributions moving away from X11, the XLibre Xserver project was launched to carry on its legacy—and now, the very first release, version 25 (Beta), is officially out.