X11's dying days mean you'll be forced to switch to Wayland

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Wayland is the Linux display server that has been in the slow, steady process of taking over X11 to deliver a more modern, robust, and secure GUI for Linux. Wayland offers better performance, better handling of complex GUIs, and even vastly improved security.

Although Wayland has been around for quite some time, the problem has been that Linux distributions and desktops have been slow to change from the long-in-the-tooth X11.

That changes now because one of the most popular Linux desktop environments, GNOME, has announced plans to disable the X11 session option in GNOME 49 and remove all X11 code in GNOME 50.

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According to Jordan Petridis, "On May 6th, we held a meeting among the GNOME Release team. We discussed the X11 session, among other things. There was one known issue with color calibration, but a fix was planned. Discussed timelines and possible scenarios for the removal and pointed out that it would be a great opportunity to go ahead with it for 49, which aligns with [Ubuntu] 25.10 release, rather than postponing to GNOME 50 and the upcoming 26.04 LTS. We set the topic aside afterwards as we'd wait for upcoming feedback from the Ubuntu team, which had a planning meeting scheduled a week or so afterwards."

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Then in June, it was announced on the Ubuntu Discourse server, "With Ubuntu 25.10 'Questing Quokka,' we are taking a significant step forward in the evolution of the Ubuntu Desktop by removing the Xorg-based Ubuntu session. Starting with this release, the 'Ubuntu' session in GDM will run exclusively on Wayland."

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Why this matters

Over the years, the biggest struggle for this transition has been that not every app has been transitioned from X11 to Wayland, and using the additional layer XWayland has been problematic at best. This caused most distributions to hesitate to migrate. On top of that, some workflows (most of which are niche) simply didn't function on Wayland.

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Fortunately, a ton of work has gone into this, and Wayland has slowly started to become the default for many Linux distributions. With GNOME dropping X11, that will force the hand of all distributions that ship with that desktop environment.

On the other hand, the KDE Plasma team has yet to announce a timeframe for the jettisoning of X11. The reason for this hesitation is the known (significant) issues with KDE Plasma on Wayland. Until every one of those issues has been addressed, KDE Plasma will continue with X11 support. Even so, KDE's Nathan Graham states that around 70 to 80% of KDE Plasma users are on Wayland.

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Hopefully, KDE Plasma won't be far behind GNOME in this transition. Until then, there are some Linux distributions that are shipping with KDE Plasma and Wayland, such as KDE Neon, openSUSE Tumbleweed, KaOS Linux, and CachyOS.

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