In preparing for the GNOME 50 Alpha release, the "50.alpha" tags just occurred for the Mutter compositor and GNOME Shell. Most notable with GNOME Mutter 50 Alpha is the X11 back-end indeed being removed to focus exclusively on the Wayland session.

The [1]merge " [2]completely drops the whole X11 back-end " with the Wayland session support proving to be in robust shape especially with its state in GNOME 49. XWayland support remains on GNOME for running X11 apps/games but it's all exclusively about the Wayland session moving forward.

Besides dropping the X11 back-end, the [3]Mutter 50.alpha release brings a number of fixes, improved tiled monitor handling, improved sticky keys handling, XWayland fixes, improved native XWayland scaling, crash fixes, and adding support for external window constraints.

Meanwhile the [4]GNOME Shell 50.alpha was also tagged today. That release extends the on-screen keyboard layouts for German and Austrian, showing the on-screen display (OSD) for any attempted brightness change, adapting to the removal of the X11 Mutter back-end, extension support for the GNOME Shell test-tool, support for the week-start-day setting, improved readability of insensitive text, and other changes.

GNOME 50 is working its way toward an official release on 18 March. GNOME 50 will be the desktop powering the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44.



[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/4505

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Mutter-Drops-X11

[3] https://github.com/GNOME/mutter/commit/f745a0e9e62811bdbc99e6b663fe65b47eaeee24

[4] https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-shell/commit/e2141cb728d6235a1293cf83cbee0f2e963f1212