Jordan Petridis, part of the teams responsible for quality control and release of GNOME, published a change request to remove systemd targets from the gnome-session package for launching in X11 environments. This is noted as the first step toward phasing out support for the X11 protocol in GNOME. However, at the current stage, the remaining functionality necessary for launching an X11 session remains in place (but is planned for removal in the next development cycle) and users can restore X11 support by manually adding the systemd targets.
The reason for these changes is cited as the decreasing testing of X11 by developers. A Wayland-based session has been the default in GNOME since 2016, and some developers believe it is time to completely abandon the X11 session and focus efforts on supporting only Wayland.
Joshua Strobl, a key developer of the Budgie desktop environment, opposed the removal of X11 support from gnome-session, mentioning that the Budgie Desktop and Pantheon Desktop projects (the Elementary OS desktop), which are based on GNOME technologies, are transitioning to Wayland, but currently fully support only X11. Therefore, if X11 support is removed from gnome-session, they will have to maintain their own forks of this component.
Source: opennet.ru
