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GNOME Moves On: What the End of the X11 Session Means (linuxiac.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[+] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (16 children)
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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    They are essentially doing the same as KDE, whose statement was linked in the article.

    KDE

    For now, the Plasma X11 session remains in maintenance mode. That means critical issues—like login failures or major regressions—will still be addressed. However, minor bugs are unlikely to get fixes unless funded, and new X11-specific features are off the table entirely.

    VS

    Gnome

    First things first: Xorg isn’t being abandoned outright. It remains maintained and is receiving necessary security patches and bug fixes. However, active development has effectively halted, with most of its original contributors now focused on Wayland.

    Edit - added Gnome quote effectively saying the same thing.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Even here the KDE communication is better on details. the gnome quote is less crisp on what it means by "active development" where as KDE precisely defines what will and will not be supported

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Gnome and KDE are not doing the same thing.

    KDE will continue to offer an X11 session for the time being:

    Current status: Plasma’s X11 session continues to be maintained.

    https://pointieststick.com/2025/06/21/about-plasmas-x11-session/

    Gnome will disable the X11 session in the next release and then remove the code:

    The most likely scenario is that all the X11 session code stays disabled by default for 49 with a planned removal for GNOME 50.

    https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/08/the-x11-session-removal/

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago* (10 children)

    For someone who has not used Gnome in 14+ years you sure seem to know a lot about it...

    X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it. No one should be surprised.

    And still, there are SEVERAL Long Term Support distros out there that will support X11 for the coming years. Please stop pretending that stuff will start breaking. It will not.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it. No one should be surprised.

    X11 is complete.

    Wayland is incomplete, and is missing essential features like accessibility and automation (ydotool will never have half the features xdotool has).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    Haven't you heard? In 2025 software isn't ALLOWED to be complete. If you're not constantly playing a cat and mouse game with someone's pet ideological crusade in your dependencies, you're an irrelevant dinosaur and can't possibly be a critical or functional part of anybody's workflow.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    X11 is "complete" in the sense that we have followed it to the end of the road. X11 has a series of well documented fundamental problems that does not make it suitable for a modern OS. I will not belabor them here (except to note that security in particulat in X11, is exceptionally weak for modern standars). These issues are unfixable because they are built into core assumptions and behaviours of all legacy apps.

    At some point there has to be a switch. There simply is not manpower to maintain 2 separate windowing systems. I am sure we would all want there to be an army of devs working on these things on maintain the 2 stacks. But that is not the timeline we live in. The number of devs working on these things is very low.

    Was it too early? I don't know. There will never be 1-1 feature parity with 30 years of legacy apps. I honestly believe that fixing things like a11y are gonna be much more tenable with only a single windowing system.

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  • [+] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)
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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Well from the bottom of the article apparently someone is looking to carry on with X11 and has started Xlibre (with what looks like TONS of new drama).

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  • [+] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)
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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    A KDE developer made a blog post on the 21st talking about X11 stats on KDE and the numbers show the majority are already on Wayland.

    At this point in time, our telemetry says that a majority of Plasma users are already using the Wayland session. Currently 73% of Plasma 6 users who have turned on telemetry are using the Wayland session, and a little over 60% of all telemetry-activating users (including Plasma 5 users) are on Wayland.

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