The first alpha release of the GNOME 50 desktop environment has been released. The release is scheduled for March 18, 2026. A 3 GB ISO image based on the GNOME OS distribution has been created for testing the alpha version of GNOME 50.
A key change in the GNOME 50 alpha release was the removal of X11 support from the GNOME Shell user interface and the Mutter compositing server. The GDM display manager has removed X11 support, and the ability to build GDM without Wayland has been discontinued. Support for running other desktop environments using X11 remains, though. gnome-session no longer supports running X11-based sessions, and the "-Dx11" option and the ability to configure X11 settings have been removed from gnome-settings-daemon.
GNOME now supports only Wayland-based sessions, and support for running under the X server has been completely removed. Running X11 applications using XWayland remains possible. It is hoped that removing X11 support will reduce maintenance costs and free up resources that can be used to improve the performance of the modern graphics stack.
Support for the X11-based GNOME session was previously dropped in Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora 43, and RHEL 10. The GTK library has deprecated the X11 protocol backend, and GTK5 plans to retain only Wayland support. The Wayland-based session has been the default in GNOME since 2016.
Other notable changes include:
- A new session saving system based on systemd has been implemented, and the GsmSessionSave object has been added to save the state of individual applications. In addition to preserving window positions after restoration, GNOME applications now have the ability to restore their state; for example, GNOME Calculator can restore the selected calculation mode. A switch has been added to the Configurator to disable the option to save the list of running applications when terminating a session and restore their windows in a subsequent session.
- Some native login screen components have been replaced with native systemd features, increasing GNOME's reliance on this system manager and requiring the creation of new layers to deliver GNOME in distributions and operating systems that don't use systemd. GDM utilizes the systemd-userdb infrastructure provided by systemd. The built-in service manager, which operated at the desktop startup level, has been removed.
- The "gnome-headless-session@" service has been added to the GDM display manager. .service" to make it easier to launch sessions without a screen (for example, when accessing the desktop remotely via RDP).
- The configurator (gnome-control-center) has been migrated to use the Blueprint interface building language. The X11 configuration backend has been removed.
- The initial setup wizard (gnome-initial-setup) has been switched to use run0 by default to launch privileged actions instead of pkexec.
- The Nautilus file manager has improved thumbnail loading, a redesigned file group renaming mechanism, reduced memory consumption, enabled the use of multiple file type filters during search, and a settings link has been added to the Recycle Bin context menu.
- The login screen now groups the list of sessions based on the display name.
Source: opennet.ru
