GNOME Mutter Now "Completely Drops The Whole X11 Backend"

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 5 November 2025 at 08:15 AM EST. 198 Comments
GNOME
The merge to GNOME Mutter has finally happened that "completely drops" the X11 back-end to make GNOME strictly focused on Wayland-based environments.

The four month old merge request by Bilal Elmoussaoui to drop the X11 back-end was merged a short time ago. The merge request sums it up as:
"Drop the X11 backend

Completely drops the whole x11 backend."

After the X11 path was disabled by default in the GNOME 49 release, the code is being outright removed for the GNOME 50 cycle.

GNOME Mutter drops X11


Following on that was this merge to better adapt Mutter to the dropped X11 backend.

GNOME 50 will continue supporting XWayland clients (apps / games) but moving forward strictly for Wayland-based desktop sessions.
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