The development team behind Gnome, the popular open-source desktop environment, has recently made significant changes to key components of the system. Specifically, alterations have been implemented in the code base of the sessions manager gnome-session and the display manager gdm. These changes, which have been accepted, allow for the assembly of Gnome without support for X11, focusing solely on components for Wayland. Similar modifications were previously integrated into Gnome Shell and Mutter’s composite manager in June. This shift will enable the exclusion of X11 components from the main assemblies, thereby reducing the resources needed for support.
This update is part of a broader initiative aimed at making X11 optional dependencies, a project that has been in development for the past two years. Since 2016, the Wayland Protocol session has been the default option in GNOME. Some developers argue that it is now time to move away from X11 entirely and concentrate efforts on supporting Wayland exclusively. Furthermore, Red Hat has made moves to relegate the X.org server to the category of obsolete in Rhel 9, with plans for complete removal in a future release like Rhel 10. These changes have been welcomed by developers of Fedora Linux and other distributions.