Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

Distros align with GNOME 49's move to make Wayland the only supported session

Like any other distro with GNOME 49, the next interim release of Ubuntu will be Wayland-only – at least in its GNOME variant.

This is no big surprise, and it follows both parallel and upstream announcements. Upstream, because GNOME 49 will remove the X11 session, and parallel, because the corresponding release of Red Hat's free community distro, Fedora 43, will also be Wayland-only.

We anticipate some user resistance to this change, and more to what's coming down the pipe in the near future, as the GNOME project is also planning to introduce stronger dependencies on systemd. At present, GNOME runs fine on the BSDs and systemd-free Linux distributions, but that is about to get a great deal harder. Soon, GNOME will effectively be Linux-only, unless the maintainers of versions for other OSes do some heroic porting work. That also goes for distros with non-standard userlands, such as the remarkable Chimera Linux with its FreeBSD-based userland, which currently uses GNOME by default.

According to a post in the Ubuntu Budgie Discord from the project's founder and leader David Mohammed, Ubuntu Budgie 25.10 will also be Wayland-only.

That aside, the new change only applies to the GNOME variants of Ubuntu and Fedora. Both distros offer multiple other desktop environments – in Ubuntu's case, its other flavors offer KDE Plasma, LXQt, Cinnamon, Kylin, MATE, Unity, and Xfce. All of these currently offer X11 sessions, although both the GNOME and KDE-based Kubuntu already uses Wayland by default.

It's significant, though, because GNOME is the default desktop edition of Ubuntu, just as it is in Fedora Workstation. We strongly suspect that many users will look no further than the flagship recommendation, and only the knowledgeable and motivated will go exploring to find alternative editions. The flip side of that, of course, is that anyone knowledgeable enough to have a desktop preference won't be affected by the move.

From the project's beginnings with Ubuntu 4.10 "Warty Warthog" 21 years before "Questing Quokka," Ubuntu was GNOME-first, despite its five-year dalliance with its own in-house Unity desktop, which became the default from Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" until 17.04 "Zesty Zapus." After that, it was back to GNOME – albeit the new GNOME 3 – with 17.10 "Artful Aardvark," which used GNOME 3.26.

The teams behind most of the alternative desktop environments in Ubuntu are also working on adopting the new display protocol. Several already offer at least some degree of Wayland support, including the LXQt desktop used in Lubuntu and the Xfce desktop in Xubuntu. Fedora also offers the distinctly GNOME-like COSMIC and several tiling environments that are Wayland-only.

Not everyone is happy about this, of course, which is why the Xlibre fork of the X.org X11 server was recently announced. According to that new project's leader, the X.org maintainers have turned down thousands of code changes and improvements to its X11 server in recent years.

Although distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, and desktops such as GNOME, are FOSS projects and are given away for free, the organizations behind these distros are commercial operations. Both in financial terms (how much money it makes and how much it spends) and also in terms of staffing, Red Hat is by far the largest corporate sponsor in the Linux world. In addition to obviously Red Hat-centric tools such as DNF and RPM (which originally stood for Redhat Package Manager), the IBM subsidiary is or was the primary sponsor of GNOME, Gtk, systemd, Wayland, Flatpak, Pipewire, OStree, Podman, and many other pivotal parts of Linux.

RHEL only includes the GNOME desktop (as does SUSE Linux Enterprise in recent years – there's no KDE in SLE, although IceWM is available). Furthermore, RHEL 10 is out now and it is Wayland-only. It is fair and reasonable that Big Purple is mainly motivated to focus its efforts on the tools and technologies that go into the products that make it money.

So, although some of the claims of the Xlibre founder may sound paranoid, we're inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on this. It is perfectly plausible that Red Hat really does want the X.org X11 server to shrivel up and die. This goes for Red Hat staff, too. As a former employee, this vulture can attest that the company culture is very strong. We have no difficulty believing that some X.org people might be actively rejecting any efforts to keep the X11 server alive and maintained.

Contrary to what some overly partisan FOSS advocates would have you believe, there are still valid reasons to want to use X11 instead. Simon Peter, the developer of the Hello System and the AppImage packaging format, is known online as ProbonoPD and has an encyclopedic GitHub gist titled "Think twice before abandoning Xorg," which describes a lot of the problems and issues around Wayland.

We've also often seen claims that the same teams develop both X11 and Wayland, which is why this article carefully talks about the X.org X11 server rather than X.org in general. The X.org Foundation does other things – as that page says:

This stack includes, but is not limited to, the following projects: DRM, Mesa, Wayland and the X Window System

Its sibling, Freedesktop.org, used to be called the X Desktop Group, but as it's no longer centred around X, the name change makes sense. Between them, they help coordinate the development of lots of elements of FOSS desktops for Unix-like OSes, including a long list of specifications, many of which are still called XDG.

There's a crucial but often overlooked distinction here. Yes, X.org develops the reference implementation of X11, but it's not the only implementation, and it never was. X.org was forked from XFree86 around 2004, and although development is dormant, XFree86 still exists.

There are or have been multiple active forks of X.org. OpenBSD uses Xenocara, developed independently. The FreeBSD X11 server and NetBSD X11 servers are their own forks, too. Although it's very different, the X11 server for Apple macOS, XQuartz, is also still around – even if it's not bundled any more.

The proprietary UNIX variants that are still in maintenance also have their own ports. Solaris 10 offered a choice of three but Solaris 11 has only its own version of Xorg. AIX has AIXwindows with its own X server. HP-UX offers two [PDF], one for HP Visualize graphics cards and another based on XFree86 for other GPUs. Before XFree86 was mature, there were a number of proprietary commercial X11 servers for Linux, such as Metro-X and Xi Accelerated-X.

Windows has its own GUI, of course, but it's been possible to run UNIX binaries on Windows NT ever since the first version, Windows NT 3.1 in 1993 – and since X11 runs over the network, the machine running an X11 app (the "client") can be a different computer to the one displaying the app (the "server"). As such there are multiple X11 servers for Windows, both for local and remote apps. Some are proprietary commercial servers, such as OpenText Exceed, X-Win32, Netsarang Xmanager, MobaXterm, and X410, among others. There are also multiple FOSS X servers for Windows, including VCXsrv, Xming [note, HTTP site], and Cygwin/X.

Many of these use code from X.org, but that's the whole point of FOSS. They aren't written by or maintained by X.org, and even if it and all Red Hat staff stop work on X11 completely, that doesn't mean these downstream projects will suddenly cease to exist. In an ideal world, we'd like to see Xenocara and XLibre work together and become a new current FOSS X11 reference implementation, but such mergers are sadly rare. Even so, X11 exists in a much bigger and wider world than just Linux distributions – and even if GNOME and KDE both abandon X11 in a year or two, that still leaves dozens of other desktops that won't. ®