The first alpha release of the GNOME 50 desktop environment has been unveiled. The release is scheduled for March 18, 2026. To test the alpha version of GNOME 50, an iso image (3 GB) based on the GNOME OS distribution was created.
Key changes in GNOME 50 alpha include the removal of code to support the X11 protocol from both the custom shell GNOME Shell and the composite server Mutter. The GDM Display Manager has also removed support for X11, keeping Wayland as the only option. GNOME now only supports Wayland-based sessions and has completely dropped support for running an X server. However, it is still possible to run X11 applications using XWayland.
In distributions, support for the X11-based GNOME session has already been discontinued in Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora 43, and RHEL 10. The GTK library also deprecated the backend for the X11 protocol, which is planned to remain only in GTK5 Wayland support. A Wayland protocol-based session has been the default in GNOME since 2016.
