An update on the X11 GNOME Session Removal

A year and a half ago, shortly after the GNOME 45 release, I opened a pair of Pull Requests to deprecate and remove the X11 Session.

A lot has happened since. The GNOME 48 release addressed all the remaining blocking issues, mainly accessibility regressions, but it was too late in the development cycle to drop the session as well.

Now the time has come.

We went ahead and disabled the X11 session by default and from now on it needs to be explicitly enabled when building the affected modules. (gnome-session, GDM, mutter/gnome-shell). This does not affect XWayland, it’s only about the X11/Xorg session and related functionality. GDM’s ability to launch other X11 sessions will be also preserved.

Usually we release a single Alpha snapshot, but this time we have released earlier snapshots (49.alpha.0), 3 weeks ahead of the normal schedule, to gather as much feedback and testing as possible. (There will be another snapshot along the complete GNOME 49 Alpha release).

If you are a distributor, please try to not change the default or at least let us (or me directly) know why you’d need to still ship the X11 session.

As I mentioned in the tracking issue ticket, there 3 possible scenarios.

The most likely scenario is that all the X11 session code stays disabled by default for 49 with a planned removal for GNOME 50.

The ideal scenario is that everything is perfect, there are no more issues and bugs, we can go ahead and drop all the code before GNOME 49.beta.

And the very unlikely scenario is that we discover some deal-breaking issue, revert the changes and postpone the whole thing.

Having gathered feedback from our distribution partners, it now depends entirely on how well the early testing will go and what bugs will be uncovered.

You can test GNOME OS Nightly with all the changes today. We found a couple minor issues but everything is fixed in the alpha.0 snapshot. Given how smooth things are going so far I believe there is a high likely-hood there won’t be any further issues and we might be able to proceed with the Ideal scenario.

TLDR: The X11 session for GNOME 49 will be disabled by default and it’s scheduled for removal, either during this development cycle or more likely during the next one (GNOME 50). There are release snapshots of 49.alpha.0 for some modules already available. Go and try them out!

Happy Pride month and Free Palestine ✊