Ubuntu Linux 25.10 Quietly Kills Off GNOME On Xorg As Wayland Takes Over (nerds.xyz)
- Reference: 0177999277
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/181234/ubuntu-linux-2510-quietly-kills-off-gnome-on-xorg-as-wayland-takes-over
- Source link: https://nerds.xyz/ubuntu-linux-25-10-quietly-kills-off-gnome-on-xorg-as-wayland-takes-over/
> Ubuntu 25.10, known as Questing Quokka, is taking a big turn under the hood. Canonical has [2]dropped support for the GNOME desktop running on Xorg . Starting with this release, the default Ubuntu session now uses Wayland only. Yes, folks, there's no longer an option to log into GNOME on Xorg.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~BrianFagioli
[2] https://nerds.xyz/ubuntu-linux-25-10-quietly-kills-off-gnome-on-xorg-as-wayland-takes-over/
X.org (Score:1, Funny)
is for boomers
Re:X.org (Score:5, Insightful)
Also people who need to log into other computers over a network, which is a really fucking common use case these days. The only reason x.org is busted is RedHat has refused to merge thousands of patches over the last 10+ years. There's a whole lot of drama going on now with an X maintainer who decided to fork X.org (now called X11libre) to finally start merging these patches and fixing shit and Red Hat pretty much banned him everywhere and deleted whole repositories. It's not just laziness it's spite. It's insane.
Re: (Score:3)
That's crazy. What was the justification for all of that? Sounds like this runs deep
Re:X.org (Score:4, Funny)
It's really simple: Wayland doesn't support screenshots, so the MPAA wants this, to crack down on all those dirty Linux users pirating DVDs one screenshot at a time.
Re: X.org (Score:2)
I screen shot all day long on Wayland...
Re: X.org (Score:3)
Oh you havenâ(TM)t hit a random ass permissions error? The other day spectacle told me it didnt have permission to take a screenshot. Its whole purpose is screenshots. Oh but screen recording worked without incident. You know maybe itâ(TM)s a weird bug let me restart the app. Nope it still persists, I guess no screenshots for me today. ⦠An hour later my squirrel brain forgets about the permission problem and knee jerks into opening spectacle. Oh wait that wonâ(TM)t work I think to
Re: X.org (Score:2)
The smaller the software ecosystem, the easier it is for RedHat to support their clients.
Re:X.org (Score:5, Insightful)
You somehow forgot to mention that this anonymous "X maintainer" chose to post anti-vax nonsense to ... yes ... the linux kernel mailing list.
Insane indeed.
Re:X.org (Score:4, Interesting)
In 2021.
[1]https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/... [iu.edu]
It doesn't really explain why the user was banned this week, this being 2025.
[1] https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2106.1/04542.html
Re: (Score:2)
> It doesn't really explain why the user was banned this week, this being 2025.
No one ever accused IBM of responding rapidly.
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong-think political views being banned is going to destroy the open source community. It's just wrong to ban/censor someone for their speech when they are not being actively offensive over something they wrote at some point in time in the past. I've looked at the xlibre repository. Sure the guy has beef with Redhat, but his repository isn't making hate speech/threats against anyone. You might like vaccines, you might not like vaccines, I had an adverse reaction to Pfizer, do I hate all vaccines, no. But I
Re: (Score:3)
You do realize that above cited link to his kernel email list contribution was a pretty short response in a thread that already consisted of a multitude of emails discussing "pandemic" related things before he added his 0.02$ ? But you choice of words already reveals that you are not interested in any rational exchange of arguments.
Re: (Score:3)
> chose to post anti-vax nonsense to ... yes ... the linux kernel mailing list.
> Insane indeed.
True. The VAX/VMS system was pretty good in its day.
Re: (Score:2)
I lol'ed.
I only got to use VMS once. IIRC correctly, the file system hierarchy was ... different, but it had versioning built in.
Re:X.org (Score:4, Informative)
Every distro that ships wayland also ships with XWayland which is transparent and works well. You can still ssh over to remote machines and run remote X11 apps. Please stop suggesting that you can't. As long as the major toolkits continue to support X11 as a backend, you will continue to be able to do this. I'm running Fedora with wayland, but I can ssh to any machine, even one that runs its own wayland desktop, and run any graphical app remotely. they switch automatically between a wayland backend and an X11 one. At least for now. Gnome developers plan to drop X11 support in GTK in a coming version, which will be very unfortunate.
Re: (Score:3)
> I can ssh to any machine, even one that runs its own wayland desktop, and run any graphical app remotely. they switch automatically between a wayland backend and an X11 one. At least for now. Gnome developers plan to drop X11 support in GTK in a coming version, which will be very unfortunate.
This is the heart of what I came here to understand. Will any pending changes break my ability to run GUI programs over ssh? I use Mint work stations to access Rocky and Raspbian systems which X11 makes possible. I will not be happy if this practicality is broken by someone else's idealism.
Re: (Score:2)
The practicality will be broken by newer software not including that functionality, and everyone choosing to use that software since the old software isn't maintained, and is broken by design.
Idealism has nothing to do with Wayland being installed on your machine- it's just why it was written. The authors are not to blame for everyone seeing it for the improvement that it is.
Local X servers that weren't running as display managers have always existed (I use XQuartz daily on my mac). Wayland has nothing
Re: (Score:2)
Not for the foreseeable future. You will continue to be able to ssh into Rocky and Raspbian systems and run remote X11 apps just as long as there are apps that support X11. For Qt-based apps, that will be a long time. For GTK apps after GTK4, I'm not totally sure.
For wayland native apps, there are networking solutions that are being worked on and should fill the gap. waypipe is one.
I do agree wayland developers are way too opinionated and don't listen to what actual Linux users say and want. Like you, I
Re: (Score:2)
You can run remote X11 apps, it's just most of those apps are going to be phased out and replaced by Wayland only apps. GTK for example is having X11 support removed - RTFA, GNOME will have X11 support removed next year.
XWayland isn't a solution to anything, it's just a compatibility layer for what the Wayland boosters give the sneering label "legacy apps".
Re: (Score:2)
That is good news. TIL something new. I have so much stuff that uses X11 and X clients that losing that functionality can be a major disruption, as I don't really want to add RDP, VNC [1], or NoMachine to machines.
[1]: I wish RealVNC were more open. They were a must-have for Raspberry Pis, but they seem to be reducing the amount of licenses and increasing prices, similar to LogMeIn, and the prices for each concurrent session, are IMHO, a bit steep. So, if someone can do a remote desktop client/server t
Re: X.org (Score:2)
I still use the network run feature of X quite frequently. And has Wayland done tablet support, multiuser within one session/workspace, and color management yet? I don't see any reason to abandon a working software package for one with less features, Ubuntu.
Re:X.org (Score:4, Informative)
Ugh, I'd like to celebrate this fork but I went to the project page and started reading and it's covered in a screed filled with spelling errors and including a dig against DEI. I'll wait to get excited until it gets new leadershit.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh crikey I just read that. Gives me the heebie jeebies. Even assuming his code is sound, he'll have a hard job making this into anything other than a solo project with his outlook.
Re: (Score:2)
It's depressing but yes, he sounds like a typical Slashdotter. I'm actually surprised he likes X11 and doesn't consider it "Woke".
Re: (Score:2)
> Poor snowflake.
Yeah, it's pretty sad how this guy needs to show us on a picture of the internet where the DEI touched him.
Re: (Score:2)
> x.org is busted is RedHat
I'm skeptical of this because I've been using X on RH/Fedora for 25 years now and it still works fine.
Re: (Score:2)
This is unsurprising since you are a generally stupid person.
There is no isolation between 2 clients of an X server.
Client A can read the input same as Client B, even if client B is drawing asterisks over the characters or not.
This means any program with user-level permissions on your machine can snoop your credentials, root credentials if you're stupid enough not to use sudo, credit card numbers- you name it.
X is broken. Let it die.
LXQt (Score:2)
Frankly, I prefer [1]LXQt [lxqt-project.org] to GNOME because it's not crazy or force you into whatever the trending UI style is. It's lightweight but still has the components to be complete full desktop environment. It's based on Qt, so it works with X or Wayland.
[1] https://lxqt-project.org/
Re: (Score:1)
Sophistry like this is why nobody wants to work with you.
The final jump (Score:2)
For a long time Wayland development stalled because you could "just" go back to Xorg in the settings. By forcing the removal of Xorg you are forcing the fix of remaining issues. It will be a bit rough but it is happening six months before LTS before Wayland only gets real. It needs to happen, Xorg is literally descended from 1980s code that was designed for low resolution low bit rate displays.
Re: (Score:2)
In what way was X11 designed for "low resolution displays"?
Re: (Score:3)
It really was, the default fonts and UI toolkits are designed for 75-DPI displays and XRandR was not added for a very long time. Modern Xorg is basically duck taped with lots of extensions to the original protocol. It's not the original X11 anymore, it's full of code no one really knows what to do with. It should have been replaced in 2003 when XFree86 was having the original forking drama.
Re: (Score:2)
> the default fonts and UI toolkits are designed for 75-DPI displays
What do ancient fonts nobody uses any more or the Athena widget set nobody uses any more have to do with anything? As well, most displays used on desktops still have 100 PPI or less, which is nearer to 75 PPI than not. Most users are on 2k or less.
> It's not the original X11 anymore, it's full of code no one really knows what to do with.
Deprecate, hack, and whack. If nobody is using it any more, then it can be removed, and that will help simplify the codebase that the people who haven't made Wayland reliable after fifteen years said was too complex to maintain.
> It should have been replaced in 2003 when XFree86 was having the original forking drama.
There was no need to replace X. It's
Re: (Score:3)
> As well, most displays used on desktops still have 100 PPI or less, which is nearer to 75 PPI than not. Most users are on 2k or less.
4K on my 13" Dell XPS was annoying, but when you run 4K on a 55" monitor you end up with a DPI similar to 1080 on a 22" monitor. I have found all the remote system X11 program work great, they look good and are responsive, what more could I ask for?
Re: (Score:2)
Right you don't have any good answers.
Who cares if it has some old bitmap fonts? You don't need to use them, and it doesn't mandate that you do use them either. Supporting 75 DPI doesn't mean it's "designed for" that.
Funny thing is you're also wrong about the toolkits. The ancient ones are surprisingly good at actually respecting the DPI settings, and allowing you to configure larger fonts. Not that it's relevant because the old toolkits aren't part of the protocol anyway.
As for extensions, why is X the onl
Re: (Score:2)
Well, but it *was* designed for them. That it didn't stay fixed at the original limits doesn't mean that isn't how it was designed.
(And FWIW, I think a system designed for minimal requirements is REALLY desirable.)
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't designed for them. It came with some bitmap fonts. There's a difference. X11 even, at one point, incorporated a printing extension because they reasoned people might want to use the same API to control their printer as the screen. Tell me, do you think they would have done that when even in the 1980s, long before X11 had a printing extension, laser printers were already 300dpi, and by the mid to late 1990s most printers had over 1,000 dpi at their highest resolution?
X11 was one of the most far sig
Re: (Score:2)
But a large part of why X Window is the way it is, is that it was designed when computers were EXPECTED to have a lot less memory and disk space. It's always easier to expand something than to trim it back.
Re: (Score:2)
No, that's no how it works. The OG font system (which you were never obliged to use and few things do now) has font descriptors (XLFD) which look like this:
-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
See the two 75's in there? those indicate that that specific pixel font was designed for a 75dpi display and would be 12.00 points tall. The point is X11, the original version makes ZERO assumptions about the dpi of the display: those numbers can be arbitrary. Just because it came with a lot
Re: (Score:2)
That is NOT why Wayland stalled. They've been crap and dragging their feet for 15 years.
Re: (Score:2)
It's my understanding that anytime someone complains about something Wayland still can't do, the Wayland people's answer is that users shouldn't want that.
Re: (Score:2)
It's true. And then the 99% of people that are already using Wayland go, "huh?"
Re: (Score:2)
> Xorg is literally descended from 1980s code that was designed for low resolution low bit rate displays.
My first machine which came with X was a Sun 4/260, which was a platform launched in 1987. When most PCs were still at 800x600 or less and virtually none had more than 1024x768, It had an 1152x864 or 1280x1024 display. The initial release of the X Window System was in 1984. At the time, the just-released Macintoshes had 512x384 displays and PCs mostly had EGA with 640x350 pixels, or CGA with even fewer, though some did have Hercules (720x350). X's origin was in W, which was developed for V, which ran on the
Re: (Score:1)
We really have a disagreement of what a low resolution is, probably a generational one. 1024x768 is considered a low resolution by today's standards. Many Linux distros often don't detect 4K displays properly and render at 100% causing everything to be small. Meanwhile Apple has been doing retina displays for so long that their original retina display products are no longer supported by them.
Re: (Score:2)
> Many Linux distros often don't detect 4K displays properly and render at 100% causing everything to be small.
This happens to me only when there is an EDID problem. For example my TV claims that it is much larger than it actually is, because they apparently used one EDID for an entire line of displays. This causes text to be the wrong size. When the EDID is fixed, everything displays properly.
Over 50% of PC users are still on a 1080p display.
Re: (Score:1)
Additionally, in the odd case where DPI auto-detect fails catastrophically in Xorg, you can still just manually specify it and then everything works correctly again. The fact that large swathes of users who don't know this are demanding Xorg be completely discarded over it says everything about them.
Re: (Score:2)
That is also true. I have done it in both KDE and XFCE and it worked fine in both places. In both cases it's in font settings.
I stopped using Ubuntu (Score:3)
I found snaps to be not very good, and ultimately decided to part ways with Ubuntu because of them.
I also don't like gnome. I gave it another solid try on a 25.04 machine I was using (not my choice), and it varies between ok, strange, and awful. I really tried but it has some vexing UI decisions.
And also it took about half an hour before I hit my first Wayland related problem.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, one can certainly hope this shift from Ubuntu will lead to improvements in Wayland due to more use, but so far it's not very good.
GNOME of course is a lost cause, and systemd rode into Linux on its back, so even if it wasn't terrible I'd probably refuse to use it out of spite unless it was flatly and clearly the best. And there's no apparent danger of that happening any time soon.
Re: (Score:2)
> And also it took about half an hour before I hit my first Wayland related problem.
That's pretty damn good in the Linux world. I couldn't log in without hitting an X problem in 22.04. Switching to Wayland fixed that (x was doing something weird with my different resolution / refresh rate screen artificially limiting my 4k screen to 1080p, using Linux should give you a warm fuzzy feeling on the inside, not a warm fuzzy view on your monitor).
Linux desktop remains a bugfest. If you actually cared about switching something every time you hit a bug, you wouldn't be using a GUI period. There'd
Re: (Score:2)
Every machine in my house runs Linux, my machines at work all run Linux. I don't have problems like that, not for years. Under Wayland there is buggy shit that doesn't work because of bugs and also stuff that doesn't work because Wayland is still missing functionality in 2025 that have been ubiquitous in windowing systems since the 80s.
Re: (Score:2)
If you switch every time you hit a bug with anything computer related, you soon turn to gardening. Otherwise, I've managed to fix my Linux issues (most recent ones often related to systemd or other parts that are new - note that I've tried Wayland but switched back, will try again in a few months), and have little that annoys me, contrary to any other OS that I've used recently... But your mileage may vary, due to having different needs and preferences.
Re: (Score:2)
> I found snaps to be not very good, and ultimately decided to part ways with Ubuntu because of them.
Ubuntu manage to annoy me long before the snaps crap, I switched to Mint. In my case that got rid of all the questional stuff in Ubuntu while keeping the good stuff. YMMV.
Re: (Score:2)
Me too. The Firefox snap issues were the last straw - if you used the Snap, it will keep nagging you to quit to update it, and then if you try to update it it ignores you. Start Firefox under the assumption Firefox was updated, and it resumes nagging.
If you uninstall the Snap, add the Mozilla repo, and install Firefox from that, it'll uninstall the the repo version as part of unattended upgrades and reinstall its fucking snap. Which also leads to bookmark and history and password manage losses because apt F
Re: (Score:2)
The thing that annoys me about snaps is that the security setting are a combination of excessively restrictive to the point of making work impossible and so permissive they are useless. Particularly, they are limited pretty much to reading ~. That's where all the really sensitive information is stored, my private keys and all that jazz. But "for security" I can't get them to read the big old disk I have mounted elsewhere. This is completely useless.
I've had various other problems with file paths. On 25.04,
It's going to be 1 apt install away anyway (Score:1)
Well it's still Linux, if you want to install Xorg you can.
Re: (Score:2)
But is there a reason to, other than you want to use a DE that doesn't support Wayland?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. The real question is why would you want to run Wayland, and that's why they're removing X11 support from GNOME - to force people who thus far have been reluctant (because Wayland is awful) to use it.
Re: (Score:2)
Because you have religious feelings about it.
Kubuntu ? (Score:3)
Does this affect KDE running on X11 with Kubuntu in any way ? Last I tried Wayland didn't support VNC so that's a complete no-no for me. I don't care much about Gnome (besides liking that there's some competition), but KDE has always been nice on Ubuntu (except for the painful KDE4->KDE5 transition years [decades?] ago).
Well, Wayland on Nvidia is still fsck'd (Score:3)
I just went through this drama when I tried to use default Wayland in Fedora 41 with a pretty simple dual-monitor setup on a fairly recent NVidia card.. a mess getting the greeter to be on the correct screen and get correct screen placement once logged in. Then, crash after crash of random windows/apps.. don't even try to use Blender or other 3D tools or Kdenlive. ... heck don't even try to use desktop extensions.. Then I'm in the Fedora forums, posting for help and the response "oh, that's a well-known issue using Nvidia cards on Wayland". So, the most common accelerated graphics card brand on the market can't work properly with Wayland? I went back to X and it works flawlessly. So, of course, now stop supporting X and force me to use something that won't work going forward as the devs blame Nvidia and nothing gets fixed...
Re: (Score:2)
> So, of course, now stop supporting X and force me to use something that won't work going forward as the devs blame Nvidia and nothing gets fixed...
They're probably not wrong about it being Nvidia's fault. Nvidia drivers have been decreasing in quality relative to AMD's (they only have to work well for CUDA for 90% of Nvidia's current revenue stream to be secure, at least as far as the drivers go) and they have never put much effort into supporting Wayland. I find I'm actually looking forward to my next GPU coming from AMD, but that comes with a couple of caveats. One, I am not going to run Windows. AMD's Windows driver is still bad by most accounts. T
It's Gnome that's dropping support (Score:3)
It's not that Ubuntu just doesn't want to offer X11 support anymore. It's the Gnome project that has deprecated X11 support, so continuing to support it on Ubuntu would require more resources on Ubuntu's part. Ubuntu continues to offer a variety of desktops on X11 including Mate, Cinnamon, KDE, LXQt, XFCE, etc.
Any distro that ships gnome will be required to use Wayland for it.
A fork in the road. (Score:2)
GNOME wants to force you to choose between X.org and their Desktop/Wayland? Easy choice for me since I use XFCE.
I already have 1 foot in the grave via systemd, why are they trying to take my other foot?
Re: (Score:2)
> I already have 1 foot in the grave via systemd, why are they trying to take my other foot?
It's mostly their fault you have systemd as well if you're not a redhate user, because Debian's main excuse for adopting it was that GNOME was doing so. If you are, well, you can only blame yourself. Though also, at this point, you have non-systemd options.
Re: (Score:2)
Systemd, XFCE, I'm even still using focus-follows mouse! Still waiting for the sky to fall... or for the grass to get greener on the other side.
sigh (Score:2)
I am having a problem on my system where file requesters won't open.
I looked around and found it's a problem with gnome-gvfs. I killed it and boom, requester opened.
So I went and looked at the issue and they have declared victory and closed it.
I wanted to report that it's still an issue in 1.50.3 when they thought they had it fixed in 1.46.2.
So I try to log in and...
"Signing in using your GitLab.com account without a pre-existing account in gitlab.gnome.org is not allowed."
Your gitlab account isn't good eno
One more reason (Score:2)
> "Canonical has dropped support for the GNOME desktop running on Xorg. Starting with this release, the default Ubuntu session now uses Wayland only"
Just one more reason to not use Ubuntu. Or GNOME, for that matter. Thankfully I use neither. Mint + Cinnamon or MATE hits the spot.
It will be interesting to see how future Mint releases handle this latest hostility. So far, they have done a great job of "undoing" or working-around most of the crappiness that has infected Ubuntu over the years. But at som
What about remote desktop? (Score:2)
What about remote desktop?
Last I checked, that was on the Wayland wishlist.
Good. (Score:2)
Been using Wayland now for a couple years and it's come a really long way. I literally never use the x.org display manager, and would like some hard disk space back and less updates to shit I don't use.
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
> I literally never use the x.org display manager, and would like some hard disk space back and less updates to shit I don't use.
The display manager is the login daemon. It is minuscule.
Maybe you meant to say the display server? It's not very big in the modern scheme of things, either.
Maybe you meant to say all of X? But you cannot get rid of all of X without abandoning all applications which only target X. That is becoming less of an issue as more toolkits gain support for Wayland, and already isn't a show stopper for GTK or Qt applications, but is still a thing and will be for a while.
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. And on top of that, I still fail to see any convioncing reason to move to wayland, as x.org continues to work.
Re:Good. (Score:4, Informative)
For me it is important you can still open GUI apps on remote machines, such as a nice text editor over SSH to a server, which X has always be great at doing. While this is still possible with both a server and client using Wayland it has become trickier as there is more mucking around to get the environment right.
Re: (Score:1)
Agreed. Wayland causes nothing but headaches on remote GUI machines. I was trying with RHEL to use Wayland, but after way too much time spent mucking with it, I just went back to X. Added benefit was I increased the computational speed of the process I was actually trying to run by moving it to X, which seemed contrary to what Wayland is selling itself as.
Re: (Score:1)
You increased its computational speed?
If you're not a liar, then at the very least you need to take some night courses.
Re: (Score:3)
As for saving disk space, you're mistaken there. You even have a full X server installed, XWayland. Certainly all the X11 libs including libxcb are all there. You can still run X11 apps and even ssh to another machine and remote an X11 app because of all this. Backwards compatibility is a good thing.
I've also been using wayland for a couple of years, with KDE, and it is working pretty well for me. There are a few things that bother me, namely focus-follows mouse behavior with kwin on wayland is not near
Re: (Score:2)
I think part of the reluctance/animus towards Wayland comes from the initial approach towards transparent network display support -- I read at the time that one should just use VNC instead.
Re: (Score:2)
Another part is that it breaks functionality we're using in the name of security, while X11 has security mechanisms that could have been improved to solve the same problem.
Re: (Score:3)
> while X11 has security mechanisms that could have been improved to solve the same problem.
Elaborate?
X is kind of broken by design.
xinput list, xinput test if you'd like to see just how broken.
Now do that while changing a password.
Re: (Score:3)
That is true. Right now, the primary X11 security mechanism is to not allow remote connections, use cookies, and tunnel the X client over SSH. This provides the usual protection (authentication, encryption, etc.), but can be weak at the X client side, especially if that user gets taken over.
However, no other windowing system allows for remote client access, and it can be a lifesaver when dealing with commercial apps that require a GUI for setup.
Re: (Score:2)
That was one high profile case where they basically said "Oh your use case only applies to X%, so we'll ignore you" when those who needed it really needed it, and when virtually every use case applies to a minority.
"Pffft, you want to play games? Only 5% of users do that!"
But it wasn't just that. The Wayland stack has only recently gained the ability to allow people to record their screens or take screenshots, for instance. For the longest time the Wayland advocates were claiming even that wasn't a common u
Re: (Score:2)
Most Wayland desktop environments set the DISPLAY variable, and fire off XWayland on demand. So you can just ssh -X as you always used to, and it just works. Remote X11 windows show up on my wayland desktop just like they always have. It's analogous to Xquartz on macOS which offers the same functionality. As long as the remote machine has applications that require and use X11, it will work fine under Wayland desktop environments. I happen to use and recommend KDE.
If you want to remote a wayland-native
Re: (Score:2)
My only thing I miss about XFree86/x.org is the ability for remote clients to connect. I've used that functionality fairly often, because I'd encounter some commercial app that has to have a GUI for it, and I didn't want to play the xdrp/remmina dance just to log into another Linux machine.