How will they reconcile this with Ubuntu that wants 26.04 LTS to still be able to launch X11 sessions from GDM?
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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The source code is freely available and GNOME isn't beholden to Canonicals decisions. If the Ubuntu devs want to keep X11 around nobody can stop them from maintaining it themselves, or pay somebody from the GNOME team to do it for them.
We went ahead and disabled the X11 session by default and from now on it needs to be explicitly enabled when building the affected modules. (gnome-session, GDM, mutter/gnome-shell).
Aside from a simple flag change and a recompile before Canonical adds the packages to their repo, it doesn't sound like this will affect Ubuntu at all. They probably already do this anyway to add their own little patches.
The most likely scenario is that all the X11 session code stays disabled by default for 49 with a planned removal for GNOME 50.
GNOME 50 is when Canonical will truly need to either move to Wayland or do something else.
Seems fairly reasonable of a timeline from the GNOME team, IMO.
Something tells me Canonical won't just kneel to THE ALMIGHTY GNOME TEAM
I know, right? Quite ironic that their own devs were going on about how unhappy they were with GDM dropping X11 session support.
i think they will still offer a x11 session as fallback, why not. its not much effort for now.
is there anything big still missing from wayland at this point, though? even nvidia is defaulting to wayland these days on ubuntu.
GDM launches other environments too. I do not think it is about GNOME itself.
A big thing missing from Wayland are all the other X11 window managers (hundreds of them) and desktop environments (like XFCE and Cinnamon) that people may want to use.
GDM won't be able to launch X11 environments after GNOME 50 is my understanding.
to be fair, keeping cinnamon on x11 was a major oversight. its the reason i don't really recommend mint. who knows what other major oversights are in there.
Yeah, but Canonical have stated they want X11 session support (for GDM to be able to launch, not necessarily for GNOME's X11 session), for 26.04 LTS, for one last LTS.
Hopefully GDM can still run X11 Desktops that's what I care the most
What's stopping you from using wayland, out of interest?
to run legacy x11 apps that dont work under xwayland??
but ik i can use a lightweight wayland compositor like labwc
I was more wondering like what apps, since I've not had trouble myself.
Hadn't heard of labwc, will have to check it out if I run into issues, thanks.
Yw and the only app(Ik a game but whatever) i have issues with is BeamNG (Native and proton with Vulkan renderer)
Does it actually play better native than under proton/wine? Should be a dumb question but a lot of the games I've tried that are "native" work far better when I force them to use proton than let them be native.
It works better on Native wth?? i used to have issues with that(on kde) but thank you for telling me to try native
but i remember i heard Native is worse due to the oudated OpenGL/Vulkan version and its wayy buggier
I sometimes install some windows programs in lutris. With some apps, the setup.exe wizard shows as a black window. Switching to xorg allows me to run the full setup without issues.
I also remember having issues with Nvidia/gnome and Wayland, but I haven't tried in a while and the Nvidia driver got updated a few times in the mean time.
Huh, interesting. I have seen the black window thing before but only with electron apps, and those can be told to use in-proc GPU to get around that issue. I assume that's not the issue you had.
I honestly can't remember what the exact issue was. I would love to be on Wayland all the time, but I'm still happy to have the xorg session when I need it.