Last week the GNOME 47 development code saw [1]Wayland DRM lease protocol support for enhancing VR headset handling and separately was also [2]accent color support for GNOME Shell . Adding to the recent slew of changes landing for GNOME 47, the GNOME Shell and Mutter code can now be successfully compiled -- optionally -- without any X11 support or requiring any X11 build dependencies.

For those wanting to build a Wayland-only Linux desktop experience without carrying any aging X11 baggage, GNOME 47 will be able to optionally offer Wayland-only support without carrying X11/X.Org support. [3]This Mutter merge request landed today that allows compiling Mutter with X11 support disabled. That landed today along with [4]this GNOME Shell merge request for being able to disable X11 support too.

In turn this closes [5]a two year old issue tracker over making X11 dependencies optional on GNOME.

[6]GNOME 47 is shaping up to be a very exciting desktop update due for release in September and will be found with the likes of Fedora 41 and Ubuntu 24.10.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Wayland-DRM-Lease

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Shell-Accent-Color-Merged

[3] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3776

[4] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3362

[5] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2272

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/search/GNOME+47