GNOME 50 completes the long migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code and relying on XWayland for any remaining compatibility needs.

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.

  • muhyb@programming.dev
    9·
    1 day ago

    Don’t know about the other things but “focus follows mouse” is possible on Wayland. Well, it’s possible on river at least, not sure about KDE or GNOME. Could be a wlroots related feature though.

    • pop [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      61·
      1 day ago

      I wasn’t specific enough, but I meant programmatically. In X11 we have stuff like xprop and xdotool. I can see where my mouse is, which window is underneath, activate or focus a window, etc. I mean these things in code, not visually on the desktop.

      Wayland considers these things “security risks”, and I get it, but at the same time… customization of my own OS is what drove me to Linux. 🤷🏻‍♂️

      For example: A while ago I tinkered with easystroke plus a custom script using xprop + xdotool. The way it worked (easystroke does this natively, but I just wanted to learn how to do it myself, and the GUI is a bit clunky anyway) is that you assign a stroke/gesture, and execute your script with parameters. The script verifies where the mouse is at execution by grabbing window info with xprop, and runs a different command depending on that (more often than not, using xdotool to send keys). So if I do a flick upwards, the script sees Firefox in the background and sends CTRL+T to the window. A new tab is opened. But if VSCodium is in the background of the mouse, I send CTRL+N instead, to open a new text file (tab).

      Unless something has drastically changed in the past few months, it’s my understanding that none of that is possible with Wayland, and now it’s up to the DEs (or whatever else) to come up with something that gives window info.