Although Wayland has been GNOME’s default session since 2016, X11 has continued to linger in the codebase—until now. That changed with the recent merging of two PRs (here and here), which completely removed the X11 codebase from both Mutter, GNOME’s default window manager and compositor, as well as the GNOME Shell itself.
In other words, the GNOME project is finally closing one of the longest chapters in Linux desktop history. With the upcoming GNOME 50 release, scheduled for mid-march 2026, the desktop environment will officially drop support for the native X11 session, making Wayland the sole display system moving forward.
Unless Wayland adds all feature X11 has, it’s not a worthy replacement.
X11 has a shitload of unwanted and unused features that your favorite X11 compositor is actively fighting AGAINST to render your GUI.
I implore you to pick up the X.Org source code and your favorite X11 shitshow’s source code and realize why Wayland follows the same paradigms that apple adopted in 2001 and Microsoft in 2006.
Until X11 has all the features that Wayland has, X11 people should stop bragging about it.
Counterpoint: X11 wasn’t designed with today’s security needs in mind, and developers were building based on the assumptions that those security holes would remain. We don’t actually want everything that X11 had, we only want the good bits.
Or to put it another way, the switch from X11 to Wayland = https://xkcd.com/1172/
Well I would define “features” as “the good bits” and not as “security holes”. ;)