Gnome 50 Ends the X11 Era After Decades
42 comments
·November 14, 2025killerstorm
I've been using Gnome for years, but, honestly, it just isn't good: seems like it's optimized for very basic use. Something as simple as adding launcher to a panel now requires an extension.
Also Wayland has some problem on my system (Thinkpad / Intel Xe) where it randomly just goes slow, this makes it an easy choice to try things other than Gnome.
BoredPositron
Who's gonna tell him?
nkohari
Comments like these are less than worthless. If you're going to contribute, say something meaningful.
christophilus
I haven’t booted into an X11 environment in maybe 4 years. Wayland has been fine (Fedora + Gnome, Fedora / Arch + Niri). I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.
bytemode
Blocked in my location. Did a quick search only to find that it's blocked in many other locations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35314374
wongarsu
I was mostly surprised by the "Gnome 50" part. Last I remembered Gnome was still version 3. Turns out they jumped from 3.38 to version 40
ernst_klim
They are not planning to go Gnome 4, hence Gnome 3.40 became 40. Just like Emacs went from 1.12 to 13.
szszrk
Transition to Wayland opened so many user experience regressions. Many are solved today, or at least partially solved but...
There is still no possibility to have proper remote sessions when using Wayland. On any Window Manager and any distro. It's such a shitshow when you go into details. Nothing works, including third party tools (like NoMachine) and I could find no real hope for actual solutions being designed.
The best you can go with "remote session" on Wayland is viewing a desktop session that was already opened by someone directly on the computer. You can partially work around this by... setting your account to be automatically logged in with no password :D And even then it's a crippled experience.
A basic feature I used for the past 25 years and helped me to learn linux and offer safe space for others to learn it as well. To work around work computer limitations. To use your best hardware wherever and whenever you want.
I currently had to ditch both my favorite distro and WM because of that. But at least we can make screenshots nowadays, so I guess it could be worse.
eliaspro
"gnome-remote-desktop" does exactly that - providing (amongst other capabilities) a way to handle remote logins: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop
Daunk
I don't understand how Wayland is becoming the norm when it can't even restore window positions yet.
lobo_tuerto
Tiling window managers are the future.
aitchnyu
Site is blocked by origin server in India.
bjourne
Sadly, I recently had to switch back from Wayland to xorg because clients are getting so memory hungry. My eight year old gpu only has 2gb of vram, which I constantly run out of. Some part of the gfx stack should handle swapping out vram to main ram but it apparently isn't.
anthk
Another nail in the coffin. Bye, Red Hat. Bye, NGOME. Non GNU OldIBM Mediocre Environment. I wish GTK4 dies in IBM hands too, for the good. XFCE can go back to a community supported GTK3 anytime.
mx7zysuj4xew
X11 is not going anywhere. If anything it's Gnome adding another nail to its coffin
GuB-42
X11 desktop environments are dying, but it doesn't mean that X11 is dead. XWayland is still a thing so you can still run your X11 apps on Gnome.
The big reason why I want to keep X11 besides backwards compatibility is the ability to run GUI apps remotely, even from a server that has zero graphical capabilities. But these do not really apply to desktop environments. If you want to remote a full desktop rather than individual applications, there are better options (VNC, RDP, ...).
gabrielgio
x11 is in maintenance mode at this point and Gnome is not going anywhere. Gnome is used (and financed) by major distributions.
Nothing new is being created with x11 and the people from freedesktop don't seen to be thrilled to maintain it. I don't think should change just for the sake of changing, but I'd start looking to migrate whatever you use that depends on x11.
vidarh
For my part, I have no intention of moving off X11 for the next decade at least. The only app I use that I don't fully control is a browser, and the worst case fallback is to run the browser in a Wayland compositor that runs on X.
tokai
Are you also still running python2?
irthomasthomas
And wayland is in broken mode. KDE keep changing the default back to wayland after each update, and every time my linux systems are broken until I switch back to x11.
ColonelPhantom
What is broken for you? At this point, starting from roughly KDE 6, Wayland has been pretty much flawless for me. KDE 5.27 was pretty much fine already as well.
graemep
The problem is that I find Wayland to be a lot buggier than x11.
For example, terminal transparency using Konsole on KDE flickers for me.
Its nearly there, but not quite. Maybe Gnome has no such issues?
ColonelPhantom
Do you have more specifics? I just tried it on my machine (Fedora 42, Plasma 6.5.1 Wayland, Konsole 25.08.2, Radeon 780M) and it seems fine for me. Does it only occur occasionally/under specific circumstances for example?
exe34
x11 being in maintenance mode is the best thing that happened to it for my use case. It hasn't crashed in 15 years.
ur-whale
> x11 is in maintenance mode at this point and Gnome is not going anywhere
True.
But does not address the fact that Wayland is a bad solution to X11's problems, and that its architecturally broken from inception.
gabrielgio
I don't know the implementation details but I can't really complain about the state of wayland today. It used to be annoying to get working many years ago (worse because I had a nvidia gpu). But today I drive a nigthly build of niri, run it by just spawning an dbuss session and everything works. Bluetooth audio, screen sharing, fractional scaling, no tearing, no font blurring. Every utility I needed has been created and works quite nicely (e.g.: wdisplay). I can even play video games with HDR support.
I have a more stable experience with wayland today than I had with x11. Which to be fair was not only because of wayland but because desktop linux as a whole has made a lot of progress in the last years
user3939382
Goodbye to any trace of freedom left on Linux when you combine this with proprietary graphics drivers.
gabrielgio
I don't think I understand what you mean. Do you mean wayland is not usable with nvidia proprietary driver? I remember that being annoying but possible many year ago (with sway --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia thingy).
But if you use really old nvidia gpu you can have a mixed experience with wayland. Which is a fair problem to complain, but you can't blame that on wayland and call that lack of freedom. That problem was caused by the lack of freedom coming from nvidia gpus and how locked down they are and how nvidia for many year has been hostile towards linux desktop.
jasonvorhe
What's the substance behind this claim? It keeps on being repeated but I don't get what it's actually about. Is there anything proprietary about Wayland that I'm not aware of? What's the difference between proprietary drivers using X11 and Wayland?
dminik
Freedom is dead when a single implementation is replaced with several competing implementations implementing an open standard.
happymellon
Only Nvidia use proprietary graphics drivers?
criddell
> adding another nail to its coffin
They've been adding nails to the coffin for 25+ years now. How many more do you think it's going to take?
antiloper
X11 isn't going anywhere because distros will ship XWayland for a long time to ensure compatibility with existing X11-only applicatin.
xorg-server is gone from the linux desktop. Gnome and KDE use wayland shells by default, and that's what users get when they download a Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/whatever ISO.
pjmlp
Wayland was created by X11 developers, as they decided keeping X11 going was beyond hope.
Feel free to find volunteers to fulfill their shoes.
gabrielgio
I think we would have a lot less problems if wayland was called X12 /s
ur-whale
> X11 is not going anywhere. If anything it's Gnome adding another nail to its coffin
Yup, my feeling as well.
Wayland was sold as a sorely needed fix to X11 long-standing problems.
The fact that X11 had problems that sorely needed to be fixed is indeed true.
The fact that Wayland is the solution is unfortunately not.
Just because something is the next gen project does not mean it actually succeeded in fixing what it planned to.
Does this mean we finally get proper drag-n-drop support back? [1]
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4