All code in the Mutter compositor that provided support for the X11 protocol has been excluded from the codebase. At the same time, components for X11 support have been removed from the GNOME Shell codebase. In the upcoming GNOME 50 release, scheduled for next spring, support for operation under the X server will be completely discontinued. The ability to run X11 applications via XWayland will remain.
Preparation for the removal of X11-related code was carried out in the fall release of GNOME 49 — by default, X11 support was disabled in gnome-session, mutter, and gnome-shell, but the code was retained to allow the restoration of X11 support components during the build stage. In the distributions, support for the X11-based GNOME session has been discontinued in Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora 43, and RHEL 10. In the GTK library, the backend for the X11 protocol has been declared deprecated, and GTK5 plans to retain support only for Wayland.
The Wayland protocol session has been the default in GNOME since 2016, while the X11-based session has been increasingly poorly tested over time, and related X11 bugs remain unaddressed. The discontinuation of support for the X11 session will reduce maintenance efforts and free up resources that can be directed towards improving the quality of the modern graphics stack.
Source: opennet.ru
