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.
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”. ;)