Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 will discontinue support for X11 in their GNOME editions. This is in line with previous announcements from both the distributions themselves and GNOME. The new version of GNOME (49) no longer offers an X11 session. Fedora 43, the latest version of Red Hat’s free community distribution, is also switching to Wayland.
Although this transition was expected, according to The Register, resistance from users is anticipated. GNOME will become increasingly dependent on systemd. Currently, GNOME continues to run smoothly on BSD systems and Linux distributions that do not use systemd. This will soon become much more difficult. GNOME is increasingly limiting itself to Linux. Unless other developers are willing to do the work to keep GNOME compatible with their operating system, this also applies to Chimera Linux, for example, which has a FreeBSD-based userland and uses GNOME as its default.
According to a message from David Mohammed, founder and leader of Ubuntu Budgie, in the Ubuntu Budgie Discord, Ubuntu Budgie 25.10 will also switch to Wayland exclusively.
The change only applies to the GNOME variants of Ubuntu and Fedora. However, both distributions also offer other desktop environments. Ubuntu, for example, also has versions with KDE Plasma, LXQt, Cinnamon, Kylin, MATE, Unity, and Xfce. All of these currently still offer X11 sessions. However, GNOME is the default desktop environment for Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation, and many users choose it without further consideration. Only users who consciously prefer a different environment will be affected by this change.
Ubuntu has been focusing on GNOME for some time
Since its inception with Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog), Ubuntu has focused on GNOME. This changed temporarily with the introduction of Unity as the default between Ubuntu 11.04 and 17.04. Starting with Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), GNOME became the default again – this time GNOME 3.
Other Ubuntu flavors are also in the process of transitioning to Wayland. Some already offer partial support, such as the LXQt desktop in Lubuntu and Xfce in Xubuntu. In addition to GNOME, Fedora also offers alternatives such as COSMIC and various tile-based desktop environments that exclusively use Wayland.
Not everyone is satisfied with this development. That is why the Xlibre project was recently launched: a fork of the X.org X11 server. According to the initiator, thousands of contributions and improvements to X11 have been rejected by the X.org administrators.
Red Hat as the largest sponsor
Although projects such as GNOME and distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu are open-source and distributed free of charge, they are supported by commercial organizations. Red Hat is by far the largest sponsor of many components within the Linux ecosystem, including GNOME, systemd, Wayland, and more. RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) only provides GNOME, and since version 10, this is only available via Wayland. It makes sense that Red Hat focuses on technologies that contribute to their commercial products.
The concerns of the founder of Xlibre may sound exaggerated, but his suspicions are not inconceivable. It seems plausible that Red Hat no longer has an interest in maintaining X11. Former employees also indicate that there is a strong culture within the company that may actively oppose the preservation of X11.
Nevertheless, there are still valid reasons to continue using X11. The developer of the Hello System and AppImage, Simon Peter (known online as ProbonoPD), has an extensive GitHub page explaining why it is wise not to simply abandon Xorg.
It is sometimes suggested that the same teams are behind both X11 and Wayland, but that is not entirely correct. The X.org Foundation is involved in several projects, including DRM, Mesa, Wayland, and X11. Freedesktop.org, formerly known as the X Desktop Group, coordinates the development of many desktop technologies for Unix-like systems.
It is important to realize that although X.org develops the reference implementation of X11, it has never been the only implementation. X.org was created around 2004 from a fork of XFree86, which still exists. There are also other active forks. OpenBSD, for example, uses Xenocara. FreeBSD and NetBSD have their own X11 servers. For macOS, there is XQuartz, and commercial Unix variants such as Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX also have their own implementations.
Even on Windows, X11 servers are available, both commercially and open-source, such as VCXsrv, Xming, and Cygwin/X. Many of these use X.org code, but they are maintained independently. Even if Red Hat and X.org were to stop supporting it, that would not mean the end of X11.
In an ideal world, initiatives such as Xenocara and Xlibre could collaborate on a new reference implementation of X11. But even without that, X11 will continue to exist outside the Linux world – and even if GNOME and KDE drop it, there will be plenty of other desktop environments that continue to use it.