GNOME 49 retires X11

The development of GNOME release 49 is entering the home straight. The team has released the first alpha snapshot GNOME Mother 49.alpha.0 three weeks ahead of schedule. It can handle Wayland's xdg top-level constraints and supports the top-level tag protocol. The color display protocol now also supports the YUV422 and YUV44 color models. The version also introduces the mother SDK and removes functions for X11 session recovery. The developers have implemented native backlighting in Mutter itself and deactivated the X11 backend by default. The developers want to use the early release to get more feedback and have more time for testing.

For GNOME 49, they are planning further steps aimed at relying exclusively on Wayland for the desktop. The X11-specific code will then be completely removed by version 50. According to GNOME developer Jordan Petridis, the alpha release can currently no longer start an X11 session. However, the basic capability is to be restored by the release candidate. If this becomes too difficult, the previous X11-capable GDM will be used as a fallback. The GNOME project is thus following the development of some Linux distributions. CentOS Stream had already said goodbye to X11 at the end of last year. In addition, many other distributions now rely on Wayland as the first choice for graphical sessions.

(avr)