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GNOME 50 Ends the X11 Era After Decades (linuxiac.com)
submitted 1 month ago by cm0002@toast.ooo to c/linux@programming.dev
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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.

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[-] LostWanderer@fedia.io 62 points 1 month ago

While I have always found GNOME to be extremely limiting and highly opinionated, I don't mind this change. Wayland has improved quite a bit and will only get better with time, x11 is an aging standard. It's natural that it will eventually be dropped in favor of a new one. Wayland too will be in this position as another display server replaces it as well.

[-] kbal@fedia.io 39 points 1 month ago

For me the X11 era continues for now (until the next version of xfce I expect) and the era of GNOME ended 23 years ago.

[-] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 50 points 1 month ago

Gnome is so bad it hurts. I was reading a blog post by factorios linux dev earlier.

Once Wayland support was implemented, I received a bug report that the window was missing a titlebar and close buttons (called "window decorations") when running on GNOME. Most desktop environments will allow windows to supply their own decorations if they wish but will provide a default implementation on the server side as an alternative. GNOME, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that all clients must provide their own decorations, and if a client does not, they will simply be missing. I disagree with this decision; Factorio does not need to provide decorations on any other platform, nay, on any other desktop environment, but GNOME can (ab)use its popularity to force programs to conform to its idiosyncrasies or be left behind

[-] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 22 points 1 month ago

Ah yes, client-side decorations. One of their most controversial decisions (and for the GNOME project, that's really saying something). And yet, no amount of user feedback will ever break them out of their "we know your needs better than you do" attitude.

[-] imecth@fedia.io 8 points 1 month ago

People just want things to never change. How many of those users do you think actually bothered to look into why GNOME won't implement SSDs?

[-] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I don't understand what change has to do with it. The problem is, lots of people have used it, tried it, criticized it, and been ignored. It has nothing to do with change.

Change is fine, as long as the new version is better than the old one. Look at how KDE evolved. Sure, there were a lot of people that didn't like the 3 -> 4 transition (not me personally, I loved KDE4), but very few people lament what KDE has become today and it certainly is very different from what it was during the 3.x days.

Personally, yes, I and a lot of other users have read why GNOME does not implement SSDs, and frankly their reasoning is not very convincing, but I don't think it matters that much. The fact is, users don't care why it's not implemented - if they don't like it, they're just going to criticize the project and that's just why GNOME is so widely hated.

Trust me, I don't want to hate GNOME - I wish I could just make my life easy and use it as a sane default. But if it's not good, then I can't do that - and by "good", I mean how I define a good desktop, not whatever creative definition they dreamed up.

[-] rarsamx@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

People compare gnome to Desktops with a 30 year old interface which is painfully cumbersome but that they are used to.

I was on the no Gnome camp after Gnome 2 but came back around Gnome 40 (2022) and I was surprised at how simple and stable it is. I agree that many things that are extensions should be built in, but I also agree with the filosophy of not spreading resources to thin and if people want a feature, they can build it.

I only use two or three extensions but mostly need only one: Forge.

I still use Niri as my primary environment but I think that Gnome is good.

I grind my teeth every time I need to use an environment with an old style menu and cumbersome tiling.

C'mon. End users haven't used drop down menues to start apps for a long time. The iOS/Android drawer style is more comfortable and can adapt to the user's organizational preferences.

[-] relativestranger@feddit.nl 2 points 1 month ago

i think gnome is actually pretty good... for a desktop with limited duties. like launching a browser and email--perhaps a word processor, and not much else. think a chromebook alternative that could actually do more if you wanted. a lot of things are 'hidden' to the user by default, what a user does need to be able to access (wifi, etc) is relatively easy to find, nice big icons that you can put front-and-center while relegating system-related things to a folder. i've set up a number of systems like that.

for my own uses though, gnome does need a half-dozen extensions for me to consider it 'usable'.. but i would still prefer a 'traditional' desktop experience such as cinnamon

[-] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I completely agree. For basic things, it is very good. But for productivity, it leaves a lot to be desired, because they (the developers) simply cannot accept that different people work in different ways and they refuse to accommodate that.. I prefer environments that can be adapted to my workflows - I don't want an environment that forces me to adapt to it. And it doesn't help that extensions tend to break on upgrades.

[-] imecth@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago

The CSDs vs SSDs has very little to do with users, it's about pushing application developers to create their own decorations and get rid of the awful title bar. In the end GNOME caved and created libdecor and now I still have half my applications with an extra bar that has literally 1 button.

[-] coronach@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 month ago

I think the conflict comes from the philosophical opposition to the application being in control of such a thing. Title bars are for window management and application termination, which are beyond the purview of the application itself. GNOME decided that they wanted it to be something different and include application controls as well all on their own.

[-] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Interesting, I was not aware of libdecor. Sorry to hear that it degraded your experience - it really sucks when things like that happen. For what it's worth, I have seen some interesting themes which could be a reasonable solution to that problem - basically, they made the titlebar very thin or completely missing, except in the area where the window buttons were located, which were enlarged. Not sure which window manager they were made for though - I think it was either xfwm or openbox.

But in any case, this is the problem with CSD - it doesn't really have a complete, holistic vision. It's great that they're trying to be innovative, but then they very quickly run into problems like the one described by the Factorio developer above. So now they're in a very awkward position that simply cannot meet everyone's needs.

And yet, we never had this problem before they went on their quixotic CSD journey - that's why many people think it was a really bad idea.

[-] Scrollone@feddit.it 6 points 1 month ago

I used to love GNOME 2, but now it's unbearable. It looks and it behaves as if it's a toy for kids.

Also, why do apps have buttons in their title bar? It makes no sense.

I'm sad that a good open source project such as GNOME has become so bad.

[-] rarsamx@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago

Become "so bad" is different than "I don't like it"

A lot of people use gnome without any issues. It's stable, it has one of the simplest workflows and it's generally out of the way.

[-] dreugeworst@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

on the contrary, why do so many old apps waste all the space in the title bar just for the title and 3 buttons? it makes no sense.

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[-] INeedANewUserName@piefed.social 21 points 1 month ago

Have repeatedly run into issues with Wayland. Have gotten it to do some obscure things I haven't gotten X11 to do but I don't need those things. It has failed to do things I need. Maybe it is time to give it another shot but it has been a major downgrade for a long time in my lived experience.

[-] Eldritch@piefed.world 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

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[-] ThoGot@feddit.org 5 points 1 month ago

Do you have some examples for someone who has basically no idea about linux?

[-] rozodru@pie.andmc.ca 4 points 1 month ago

can't speak for OP but the only beef I have with wayland is discord. If i'm in voice comms it will ONLY work if I'm either in a game or my discord is focused. if I'm in my web browser or doing something else like in an IDE or terminal etc then voice doesn't work. It's annoying.

If anyone has a workaround for that I'd love to hear it. on x11 never had these issues but I can't use x11 as my primary machine is a hybrid nvidia and amd gpu laptop so no gaming on x11.

[-] hallettj@leminal.space 4 points 1 month ago

My family uses Discord heavily, and I've set up a number of different distros and window managers at different times, all using Wayland, and I have not seen this issue. I think that includes running in browsers using Xwayland, and using native Wayland - but I'm not 100% sure because I've been running browsers in native Wayland mode for a long time, while my family members usually use the Discord Electron app.

There might be some more specific issue on your system, like a pipewire misconfiguration? Do you use pipewire?

[-] rozodru@pie.andmc.ca 1 points 1 month ago

well it's been happening with me across multiple distros like Arch, CachyOS, NixOS, etc and it's always been the same. yes I'm using pipewire so I'm not exactly sure what it is.

[-] ArchEngel@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Gonna chime in and add that I have also not had this issue, Nobara Linux here. My discord voice comms work great in browser, and the various other versions I have run. Hope you figure it out!

[-] rozodru@pie.andmc.ca 1 points 1 month ago

are you using push to talk? that's the only thing I can think of that's not working for me. because everyone is saying it works fine in wayland but again I've used both flatpaks and packaged versions across multiple distros and the push to talk outside of discord or a game never works for me.

[-] domi@lemmy.secnd.me 2 points 1 month ago

That explains things. Non-focused applications cannot read keystrokes on Wayland.

Since Discord is still running in X11, if you are on KDE you can enable one of these options as a workaround:

Hopefully Discord (or a wrapper for it) will eventually get proper global shortcut support, in which case you can set it right in the KDE shortcut settings.

[-] mycodesucks@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

The standard workaround seems to be "scream at the developer to rewrite their features around Wayland's limitations and stop bothering the Wayland developers asking for feature parity". You know... The same way Android handles updates.

[-] vivendi@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yes, the insane old ways are being phased out for a reason. Sorry that we don't keep the world in a heavily romanticized version of 2003 forever.

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[-] domi@lemmy.secnd.me 1 points 1 month ago

I'm using the Discord Flatpak on Fedora Kinoite (Wayland/KDE) and have no such issue.

[-] hallettj@leminal.space 4 points 1 month ago

In the earlier days of Wayland I was not able to reproduce the custom keyboard mappings that I set up with xkb. Xkb worked, but only in windows running under Xwayland. I know the common xkb presets, like changing caps lock to a control key, are reproduced in Wayland implementations. I had really custom mappings that required more general remapping capability.

I fixed my setup by building a keyboard with a microcontroller that I can program with ZMK. It's a better setup, although it did take more time, effort, and money. The bottom line is I'm enthusiastic about Wayland, even though I had to find another way to reproduce one of my favorite features.

[-] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 7 points 1 month ago

Kanata does this and more

[-] hallettj@leminal.space 4 points 1 month ago

Oh, kanata looks great! Good to know!

[-] UnityDevice@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago

I finally had to switch recently because I use gnome, and they removed the X11 session. I managed to sort out most of the missing parts needed for my workflow, but it still feels like a downgrade. It feels much more sluggish, things that were instant now take a second, and I've been under a constant barrage of bugs and glitches. Some make the whole experience feel like using amateur software. I'll be typing, then press a global shortcut to launch some software, and I'll end up with whole desktop pausing for a second and the shortcut inserted in my text 20 times. And this happens a few times a day. Just one example.

I've almost exclusively used Linux desktop for the past decade and it was a smooth experience, but with gnome-wayland I finally understand the people that were always complaining about everything being broken and glitchy.

I can understand having some bugs, but if text or mouse input doesn't work properly, or if using my new laptop suddenly feels like using my much slower old one, then I may as well look for a different desktop.

[-] morto@piefed.social 9 points 1 month ago

I still have issues with wayland when using extensions inside other software that aren't compatible with wayland. They tend not to work even with xwayland. Well, I hope compatibility improves until I need to update...

[-] tetris11@feddit.uk 3 points 1 month ago

Stuck on Awesome - all my custom Lua bindings and integrations I've built over the last decade are there

Looking for a wayland successor so I can jump :'(

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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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