In aligning with upstream GNOME 49 expected to ship with X11 support disabled by default, Canonical announced today that the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release will also ship without support for running the GNOME desktop on X11.
Jean Baptiste Lallement of the Canonical Desktop Team announced minutes ago that Ubuntu 25.10 will be shipping without support for GNOME on X.Org. Aligned with upstream GNOME, Ubuntu 25.10 will only support running GNOME on the Wayland session. Support for X11 client apps/games though will continue to be maintained via XWayland but there will no longer be X11 session support for the desktop. Other non-GNOME desktops are unaffected by this move.
Jean Baptiste Lallement wrote on Ubuntu Discourse:
“Over the past several cycles, the Wayland experience has matured significantly, including improved support for Nvidia drivers, offering a more robust security model, stable support for most daily workflows, better graphics stack isolation and improved touch and hiDPI support.
Meanwhile, maintaining both X11 and Wayland sessions introduces technical debt and increases maintenance burden, limiting our ability to innovate efficiently.
GNOME is planning to remove Xorg support for GNOME 49. We are taking a proactive step in 25.10 to prepare our users and ecosystem ahead of that deadline.”
This shift to GNOME-only-on-Wayland for Ubuntu 25.10 comes one cycle ahead of their all important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.
