A year and a half ago, shortly after the GNOME 45 release, I opened a pair of Pull Requests to deprecate and remove the X11 Session. A lot has happened since. The GNOME 48 release addressed all the remaining blocking issues, mainly accessibility regressions, but it was too late in the development cycle to drop...
The source code is freely available and GNOME isn’t beholden to Canonicals decisions. If the Ubuntu devs want to keep X11 around nobody can stop them from maintaining it themselves, or pay somebody from the GNOME team to do it for them.
We went ahead and disabled the X11 session by default and from now on it needs to be explicitly enabled when building the affected modules. (gnome-session, GDM, mutter/gnome-shell).
Aside from a simple flag change and a recompile before Canonical adds the packages to their repo, it doesn’t sound like this will affect Ubuntu at all. They probably already do this anyway to add their own little patches.
The most likely scenario is that all the X11 session code stays disabled by default for 49 with a planned removal for GNOME 50.
GNOME 50 is when Canonical will truly need to either move to Wayland or do something else.
Seems fairly reasonable of a timeline from the GNOME team, IMO.
GDM launches other environments too. I do not think it is about GNOME itself.
A big thing missing from Wayland are all the other X11 window managers (hundreds of them) and desktop environments (like XFCE and Cinnamon) that people may want to use.
to be fair, keeping cinnamon on x11 was a major oversight. its the reason i don’t really recommend mint. who knows what other major oversights are in there.
Yeah, but Canonical have stated they want X11 session support (for GDM to be able to launch, not necessarily for GNOME’s X11 session), for 26.04 LTS, for one last LTS.
How will they reconcile this with Ubuntu that wants 26.04 LTS to still be able to launch X11 sessions from GDM?
The source code is freely available and GNOME isn’t beholden to Canonicals decisions. If the Ubuntu devs want to keep X11 around nobody can stop them from maintaining it themselves, or pay somebody from the GNOME team to do it for them.
Aside from a simple flag change and a recompile before Canonical adds the packages to their repo, it doesn’t sound like this will affect Ubuntu at all. They probably already do this anyway to add their own little patches.
GNOME 50 is when Canonical will truly need to either move to Wayland or do something else.
Seems fairly reasonable of a timeline from the GNOME team, IMO.
Something tells me Canonical won’t just kneel to THE ALMIGHTY GNOME TEAM
This aged well lol
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-25-10-drops-support-for-gnome-on-xorg/62538
I know, right? Quite ironic that their own devs were going on about how unhappy they were with GDM dropping X11 session support.
i think they will still offer a x11 session as fallback, why not. its not much effort for now.
is there anything big still missing from wayland at this point, though? even nvidia is defaulting to wayland these days on ubuntu.
GDM launches other environments too. I do not think it is about GNOME itself.
A big thing missing from Wayland are all the other X11 window managers (hundreds of them) and desktop environments (like XFCE and Cinnamon) that people may want to use.
GDM won’t be able to launch X11 environments after GNOME 50 is my understanding.
to be fair, keeping cinnamon on x11 was a major oversight. its the reason i don’t really recommend mint. who knows what other major oversights are in there.
Yeah, but Canonical have stated they want X11 session support (for GDM to be able to launch, not necessarily for GNOME’s X11 session), for 26.04 LTS, for one last LTS.