A release candidate for GNOME 49 has been presented — the last testing release before the scheduled release on September 17. The published testing release is notable for rolling back a previous change that disabled X11 support by default in the GDM (GNOME Display Manager).
Initially, the plan for GNOME 49 was to disable X11 support in GDM by default, while still allowing the launch of desktop environments based on X11 and retaining the X11-related code for optional restoration in distributions. The return of X11 support in GDM is explained by the difficulty in separating the ability to run modern X11 sessions from using X11 in GDM itself, for example, support for XDMCP, outdated x11 sessions, and non-user x11 sessions.
The build option 'x11-support' that was implemented to disable X11 turned off all X11 support, including the ability to launch desktop environments based on X11, since the session handling code in /usr/share/xsessions was also disabled. An attempt was made to separate the session handling code for X11 from the 'x11-support' build option, but it was unsuccessful due to overlaps with other X11 code, resulting in what appeared to be a messy hack.
As a result, it was decided to keep full X11 support enabled by default in GDM for GNOME 49, but not to disable it by default in GNOME 50, rather to remove the code for X11 support, leaving only the parts necessary for launching X11 sessions. Thus, the 'x11-support' option in GNOME 50 will disable building the code for starting X11 sessions in GDM and can be applied in distributions that only use Wayland.
Source: opennet.ru
