GNOME Moves On: What the End of the X11 Session Means
GNOME Moves On: What the End of the X11 Session Means
GNOME is dropping its X11 session support in the upcoming version 49—here's what this means for the X11 users.
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As typical, GNOME has a tendency to drop support to older software before the newer one is ready. I'm glad that I dumped it in 3.0 times.
They are essentially doing the same as KDE, whose statement was linked in the article.
KDE
For now, the Plasma X11 session remains in maintenance mode. That means critical issues—like login failures or major regressions—will still be addressed. However, minor bugs are unlikely to get fixes unless funded, and new X11-specific features are off the table entirely.
VS
Gnome
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.
Edit - added Gnome quote effectively saying the same thing.
Even here the KDE communication is better on details. the gnome quote is less crisp on what it means by "active development" where as KDE precisely defines what will and will not be supported
That and if you go on the gnome forums, their attitude IMO seems openly hostile to.. almost everything and everyone.
Odds are they're doing the same thing only in theory. In practice, the picture changes - typically the KDE devs are far more willing to maintain old and marginal features and/or support benefiting only a small chunk of the userbase. While the GNOME devs are way more likely to ditch it, babble something about their design vision, then try to convince the user "ackshyually you don't need it".
(A major exception is perhaps accessibility, mentioned in the text. It isn't just the Wayland devs worried about it, but also the KDE and GNOME devs. In this regard props to all three.)
Gnome and KDE are not doing the same thing.
KDE will continue to offer an X11 session for the time being:
Current status: Plasma’s X11 session continues to be maintained.
https://pointieststick.com/2025/06/21/about-plasmas-x11-session/
Gnome will disable the X11 session in the next release and then remove the code:
The most likely scenario is that all the X11 session code stays disabled by default for 49 with a planned removal for GNOME 50.
https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/08/the-x11-session-removal/
For someone who has not used Gnome in 14+ years you sure seem to know a lot about it...
X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it. No one should be surprised.
And still, there are SEVERAL Long Term Support distros out there that will support X11 for the coming years. Please stop pretending that stuff will start breaking. It will not.
X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it. No one should be surprised.
X11 is complete.
Wayland is incomplete, and is missing essential features like accessibility and automation (ydotool will never have half the features xdotool has).
Except for necessary modern features like different fractional scaling on multiple monitors...
They each fuck with my window arrangement on virtual desktops when rebooting in their own special way. I've switched to Wayland but x11 did feel more polished.
Haven't you heard? In 2025 software isn't ALLOWED to be complete. If you're not constantly playing a cat and mouse game with someone's pet ideological crusade in your dependencies, you're an irrelevant dinosaur and can't possibly be a critical or functional part of anybody's workflow.
X11 is "complete" in the sense that we have followed it to the end of the road. X11 has a series of well documented fundamental problems that does not make it suitable for a modern OS. I will not belabor them here (except to note that security in particulat in X11, is exceptionally weak for modern standars). These issues are unfixable because they are built into core assumptions and behaviours of all legacy apps.
At some point there has to be a switch. There simply is not manpower to maintain 2 separate windowing systems. I am sure we would all want there to be an army of devs working on these things on maintain the 2 stacks. But that is not the timeline we live in. The number of devs working on these things is very low.
Was it too early? I don't know. There will never be 1-1 feature parity with 30 years of legacy apps. I honestly believe that fixing things like a11y are gonna be much more tenable with only a single windowing system.
For someone who has not used Gnome in 14+ years you sure seem to know a lot about it…
I ditched GNOME in 3.0 times. And I still gave it a second try, a third, even a fourth. And my system has GNOME (and KDE, and Xfce...) applications, so certain patterns are visible even in everyday usage. And I fuck around with virtual machines to find out about random stuff, including DEs that I ditched (like GNOME and KDE) or I never used directly in my machine (like Elementary).
So don't assume "ditched it = ignorant about it".
X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it.
O rly. And the point still stands: GNOME has a tendency to drop support to older software before the newer one is ready.
Unless you want to claim Wayland reached parity with X11, and there's totally no reason people might want to stick with X11 instead.
And still, there are SEVERAL Long Term Support distros out there that will support X11 for the coming years.
This does not address what I said.
Please stop pretending that stuff will start breaking. It will not.
That is not what I said.
*Yawn* Given that
- I have little to no patience towards people who distort what others say and vomit assumptions; and
- Others might come up with something actually meaningful to contradict what I said,
It's safe to disregard you as meaningless noise, so I ain't wasting my time further with you.
[inb4 people discussing the semantics of "ditch"]
Well from the bottom of the article apparently someone is looking to carry on with X11 and has started Xlibre (with what looks like TONS of new drama).
And the guy in question is, simply put, a nutjob.
I don't even disagree with the idea of ditching X11. My criticism is timing; statistics like this show 90% X usage, either instead or alongside Wayland; it's clear most users still use X11, in one form or another. It's like making a street cars only when most people still use horse chariots.
A KDE developer made a blog post on the 21st talking about X11 stats on KDE and the numbers show the majority are already on Wayland.
At this point in time, our telemetry says that a majority of Plasma users are already using the Wayland session. Currently 73% of Plasma 6 users who have turned on telemetry are using the Wayland session, and a little over 60% of all telemetry-activating users (including Plasma 5 users) are on Wayland.
The difference between both links is huge - one shows 7%, another 73%. Since I have no idea which is more reliable, nor I think this difference is due to time (the FF link is from 2022), let's go with your link instead.
73% Wayland means 27% X11. It's still a lot; not a big problem in KDE's case, since its developers are rather emphatic on still maintaining the X11 session. Can't say the same about GNOME.