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Ubuntu Linux 25.10 Quietly Kills Off GNOME On Xorg As Wayland Takes Over (nerds.xyz) 109

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
BrianFagioli writes: Ubuntu 25.10, known as Questing Quokka, is taking a big turn under the hood. Canonical has 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.

Ubuntu Linux 25.10 Quietly Kills Off GNOME On Xorg As Wayland Takes Over More | Reply

Ubuntu Linux 25.10 Quietly Kills Off GNOME On Xorg As Wayland Takes Over

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  • 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)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @02:28PM (#65440551) Homepage Journal

      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:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @04:10PM (#65440771)

        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:5, Informative)

        by ukoda ( 537183 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @04:39PM (#65440853) Homepage
        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.
        • 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.
          • You increased its computational speed?
            If you're not a liar, then at the very least you need to take some night courses.

        • And for me it's important to be able to change the screen resolution from the command line.

          I have some old games with a low resolution and 4/3 aspect ratio running through wine and the only way to play them well is to lower the screen resolution.

          Something really done with xrandr, that I put in the scripts I use to run those games, and which lowers the resolution at launch and resets it when the game is closed.

          Last time I checked, it was still impossible to do in Wayland, with the response by some Wayland fa

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      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

      • 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.

        • 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.

          • 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.

          • 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.

            • but can be weak at the X client side, especially if that user gets taken over.

              Or even if a relatively tiny chunk of shellcode is able to run in, say, your browser due to some exploit du jour. That relatively tiny bit of code (this can be done in dozens of bytes) can now watch every physical thing you do on your machine, including authentication. Grab screens. You name it. You know this already, I'm just fleshing out exactly what you mean by it for readers.

              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.

              This is absolutely true.
              To that end, X client-servers likely aren't going away any time soon. The real issue we actually run into

        • 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)

          by caseih ( 160668 )

          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

    • 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.

  • Frankly, I prefer 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.

  • 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.

    • In what way was X11 designed for "low resolution displays"?

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by xack ( 5304745 )
        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.

        • 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)

            by ukoda ( 537183 )

            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)

            by allo ( 1728082 )

            You know what people do because they don't use the ancient rendering methods? They render using modern methods in a compositor and copy a bitmap to the Xserver. With Wayland, the graphics system itself is the compositor and you skip the copying step. So Toolkits keep doing what they are doing anyway but avoid the overhead of being compatible with a system that actually implements the way to display the results as a special case instead of a core feature. X11 is really fast if you use it to render athena gra

        • 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)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            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.)

            • 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)

                by HiThere ( 15173 )

                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)

                by allo ( 1728082 )

                "It's no exaggeration to say that Windows and Mac OS X never caught up. Windows has tried and gotten close. Apple isn't even trying."

                20 years ago apple managed seamless mode switches from powering on the computer to the desktop. Do that with Linux and X11. Good luck.

            • 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)

      by thedarb ( 181754 )

      That is NOT why Wayland stalled. They've been crap and dragging their feet for 15 years.

      • 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:The final jump (Score:4, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @03:05PM (#65440643) Homepage Journal

      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 VAXstation 100 (1088x864), Sun-1 (1024x800), and DEC Firefly (1024x768).

      It's hard to understand what you meant in the context of these facts. Could you please explain?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by xack ( 5304745 )
        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.

        • 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.

          • 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.

            • 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:4, Insightful)

    by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @02:36PM (#65440569) Journal

    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.

    • 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.

    • 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

      • 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.

      • 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)

      by ukoda ( 537183 )

      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.

    • 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

      • 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,

        • I ended up switching to Debian, which is more or less removing all the Ubuntu-ness from Ubuntu. The only major issue I've found is that Debian's installer is pretty crude compared to Ubuntu's and requires a lot of hand holding. For me, as a 50+ year old nerd, that's not an issue, but it makes it harder to recommend to others in an age where people don't use open, non-spyware, social media networks "because they have to pick a server". (Trump didn't win because people didn't have the ability to know what he

          • You know funny thing is I've never installed Debian. I switched to mint, which is pretty straightforward to install, but I usually then customize things a bit. I've no problem with trickier installs, they're not hard, I've run RedHat 5.2 back in the day, Arch, even OpenBSD on a Zaurus (that was an adventure!), but I've never had a go at Debian.

            I've not tried Mint desktop, my personal preference is a weirdass FVWM setup that no one but me likes, but I find XFCE quite reasonable with good defaults and customi

            • FWIW I meant MATE, not Mint. But the Mint project begat MATE, so that's probably why my early morning brain conflated the two.

              It's probably a good sign I did because it shows the MATE/Mint people are not shoving the branding in your face the same way GNOME and KDE do! At least that's my excuse!

              And yes, the early SystemD releases didn't help its rep, but it's stable now and it's saved my butt multiple times. The "X is old" stuff is just insane, we're literally using an OS that's a largely compatible clone of

              • And as I wrote elsewhere, X11 is arguably one the most far sighted display projects ever created in the history of computing, period.

                I quite agree. There were an amazing number of things they had right in 1987 which held up incredibly well during a period of absolutely colossal change in how computers work. It's proven to be remarkably resilient and adaptable.

                What's particularly good is the decoupling of various things. Sure these days there's a lot less call for the line drawing primitives, but it's not l

  • Well it's still Linux, if you want to install Xorg you can.

    • But is there a reason to, other than you want to use a DE that doesn't support Wayland?

      • 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.

      • Because you have religious feelings about it.

  • Kubuntu ? (Score:3)

    by dargaud ( 518470 ) <slashdot2@@@gdargaud...net> on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @04:16PM (#65440781) Homepage
    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)

    by Luminary Crush ( 109477 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @04:17PM (#65440785)
    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...

    • 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:4, Interesting)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @04:41PM (#65440855)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rastos1 ( 601318 )
      Does it mean Gtk is dropping support? Does that mean that all GTK-based applications such as firefox, thunderbird, java, ... will not work on X11?
  • 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?

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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

  • >"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?

    Last I checked, that was on the Wayland wishlist.

  • I've never liked the distribution - I've used SuSE, Slackware, Mint and finally Debian... but there's a difference between "I'm not a fan" and "this unapologetically sucks". The internet is full of people having issues with Wayland.

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