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GNOME 50 Alpha Is Now Available for Public Testing as a Wayland-Only Release
The biggest change of the upcoming GNOME 50 desktop environment series is the removal of X11 support in various core components, which was initially planned for the GNOME 49 release, as GNOME is going Wayland-only from here on, except for the ability to launch other X11 desktop sessions with a per-user X server.
The GNOME 50 release also promises initial support for a session save/restore functionality, a new gnome-headless-session@username.service that makes it easier to start a headless graphical session (i.e. for RDP purposes), and support for the new “boot_display” sysfs attribute from Linux kernel 6.18 LTS in GDM.
UbuntuHandbook:
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GNOME 50 Alpha Finally Released for Testing Purpose | UbuntuHandbook
GNOME 50, the default desktop for Ubuntu 26.04 and Fedora Workstation 44, is now in alpha testing stage.
This development version is postponed by more than one week according to the release calendar. Features include entirely removed X11 support, week-start-day setting, and more.
UbuntuHandbook:
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GNOME 50 will Support Bedtime & Daily Screen Time Parental Controls | UbuntuHandbook
GNOME 50, the default desktop for next Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44, is going to add more feature options for parental controls.
As you may know, GNOME has a built-in “Parental Controls” application, allowing parents to restrict their children’s activity on computer or laptop screen.
Valnet:
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GNOME 50 goes Wayland-only as its alpha build scraps the X11 backend
The last few months haven't been great for fans of X11 on Linux. We got wind that KDE was dropping X11 in a few years, and the Budgie Desktop Environment has already scrapped it in preparation for its first major release in a decade. However, the beloved GNOME desktop environment hasn't been so quick as to go Wayland-only; until today, that is.
The GNOME team has just pushed the alpha of its newest version of its desktop environment, GNOME 50. While there's a ton to go over in the patch notes, the real spotlight is on GNOME 50's separation from X11 to become a Wayland-only desktop environment. And while X11 apps should be sticking around in the newest build, you won't be able to boot into an X11 session anymore.