Although Wayland has been GNOME’s default session since 2016, X11 has continued to linger in the codebase—until now. That changed with the recent merging of two PRs (here and here), which completely removed the X11 codebase from both Mutter, GNOME’s default window manager and compositor, as well as the GNOME Shell itself.
In other words, the GNOME project is finally closing one of the longest chapters in Linux desktop history. With the upcoming GNOME 50 release, scheduled for mid-march 2026, the desktop environment will officially drop support for the native X11 session, making Wayland the sole display system moving forward.
Fair enough.
No argument from me that some of the Wayland devs have made the whole process a whole lot more painful than it needed to be.
Purposely not providing some path to doing what needs to be done is asinine.
That said, I get that there may be some things that will be possible that just are not yet. Very few at this point.
I also think it is reasonable to ask old apps to adapt when “compatibility” would mean an inability to improve the design.
You just cannot have apps reading keystrokes in other apps for example. The things that we are moving to portals now should have been portals even in X11.