After six months of development, GNOME has released the GNOME 50 desktop environment. To quickly evaluate the capabilities of GNOME 50 specialized Live builds based on openSUSE and installation image produced by the GNOME OS initiative. GNOME 50 is also already included in the experimental builds of Ubuntu 26.04 and Fedora 44.
In the new release:
- From the custom shell GNOME Shell and the composite server Mutter removed code for support X11 protocol. In GDM Display Manager
Removed support for X11 and ended the ability to build GDM without Wayland, but retained support for running other desktop environments that use X11. gnome-session has dropped support for running X11-based sessions, and gnome-settings-daemon has removed the “-Dx11” option and the ability to configure X11 settings.
GNOME is now only capable of running a Wayland-based session, and will no longer support running an X server. It is still possible to run X11 applications using XWayland. In distributions, support for the X11-based GNOME session was previously discontinued in
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.