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.
How does Mutter X11 fit into all of this, and how does it work? It seems to be a combination of Wayland and X11. None of the above comments have addressed Mutter. Will Wayland have all the extensions like Gnome has? I have found a lot of them very useful and I would hate to see them disappear and not be available.
It is not the end of X11. If GNOME abandons X11 support, then that’s a dealbreaker for me, and it’s the end of GNOME. There are other desktop environments with a lot less bloat that are not tied to Systemd as GNOME is, another scourge upon Linux.
Why did X get so locked up that it was impossible to make X12 with fixes for the shortcomings of X11?
To me it seems like people got tied to the current solution in XOrg that they couldn’t find a way to take the next step. Protocols evolve and X12 could have coexisted with X11 just like HTTP 1.1 coexists with HTTP 2.0. Currently Wayland does this by having X11 protocol coexist with wayland protocol through XWayland. Why did X get stuck at 11 so badly?
X11 is very complicated, and full of tons of cruft no one uses anymore. For example, originally all the widgets in a window were drawn by the server. Fonts were drawn by the server. At the time was a great idea, and worked well over low-bandwidth connections. But now we want things like anti-aliased fonts, 3d graphics. All that server stuff is still in X.org, but no one uses it anymore. Instead we use all sorts of layers of extensions to the protocol. X11 was impressive for its time. And it’s amazing how well it has been extended to work. But now there are only a handful of people who understand any of the X.org code and the X11 protocol itself. It was these very people that said, there has to be a better way, so they started Wayland. I highly recommend watching Daniel Stone’s linux.conf.au talk about his work on X.org and X11, and all the intractable problems that we have with it now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
I am not arguing Wayland is the way, nor am I defending Wayland developers. But those that hate on Wayland aren’t the ones who’ve actually worked on X.org code and understand the X11 protocol.
Everything was redesigned on purpose and for very good reasons. Everything had to be taken in a different direction due to the fact many things could never be fixed or changed with x11 with regard to how it does things without just dropping the majority of its code which would mean it was no longer the same thing and would have taken even more years of work then just gradually switching to wayland. I have not used x11 in years and neither has the corporation I work for and I would not even think about x11 if this website did not write articles about it since I have absolutely no reason to use it anymore.
Yeah but that doesn’t really answer the question. Why did it get stuck at X11? X11 could and should have just coexisted with X12. Then X12 could remove all the features that nobody uses anymore like raster fonts, printer server and other cruft. These things would continue to exist in X11 and so compatebility would be maintained. Atleast in the early 2000’s a new protocol would have solved a lot of issues.
Wayland was initially X12 but it is divergence from X protocol requires a new name. Xwayland is made to maintain compatibility of X11 applications so that part is already taken care.
Wayland libraries are intentionally kept to minimum to avoid repeating the same mistakes from X11, an outdated protocol unsuitable to the modern desktops environment in an evolving world. Practically no developers want to actively maintain a pile of mess given the fact X11 suffered of fundamental design flaws like non-existent security in mind.
Wayland protocol is already in use for decades from mobile to appliances. Traditional desktop took a while because of technical debts. Getting rid of X11 tremendously helps Linux ecosystem to properly adapt in an environment with constant changes.
Ask the people from Red Hat and Freedesktop. They were proud of “killing” Xorg.
Facts. They had to do it. Even the moribund Xorg still performs better than Wayland, and uses much less battery. It will be interesting to see how increased developer interest moves XLibre even further ahead.