GNOME 49, the next major version of the popular Linux desktop environment, has just reached its first alpha release. Along with some important app changes, it marks the end of an era for X11.
X11, also known as X.Org, was the primary display system for Linux-based operating systems for decades.Waylandhas slowly taken over as its replacement, with better high-DPI monitor support, enhanced security, a more modern architecture, and other improvements. Now that Wayland has near-perfect feature parity with X11, with the remaining functionality gaps being fixed, the GNOME project is starting to wind down X11 support.
Starting with GNOME 49, the option to boot the GNOME desktop with the X11 windowing system (called ‘X11 Session’) is disabled by default. The X11 session will be fully removed with the release of GNOME 50. It’s the end of an era—GNOME has supported X11since its first releases—but one that should be mostly invisible to Linux users. Most desktop distributions have used Wayland as the default compositor for several years, and Wayland can still open software designed for X11 using the XWayland compatibility layer.
The GNOME team said in an FAQ article, “The common sentiment, shared among Xorg, Graphics, Kernel, Platform and Application developers is that any future development is a dead-end and shortcomings can’t be addressed without breaking X11. That’s why the majority of Xorg developers moved on to make a new, separate, thing: Wayland.”
There are some important changes to the default apps in GNOME 49, as well.Showtimeis replacing Totem as the default video player, thePapersdocument viewer is replacing Evince, and Devhelp is being swapped out for the shiny newManualsapp.
There’s one more technical change planned for GNOME 49, though it’s not fully implemented in this alpha release: a stronger requirement forsystemd support. Much like the X11 removal, this shouldn’t be noticeable to most people, but it might cause issues on more niche Linux distributions. It will also make porting GNOME to BSD operating systems much more difficult, if not impossible, since systemd is only built for Linux.
GNOME 49 isscheduledto be released in September 2025, and it will be used in distributions likeUbuntu Desktop 25.10.
Source:GNOME,Rust in Peace,Adrian’s blog
