For decades the Linux desktop has essentially been built around X11/Xorg.

Wayland has been “the future” for a long time, but most people still had the option to fall back to an X11 session when things broke.

With GNOME 50 that fallback seems to disappear completely. The X11 backend in Mutter is gone, which effectively means the GNOME desktop itself becomes Wayland-only.

Legacy apps can still run through XWayland, but architecturally this feels like a pretty big milestone for Linux desktops.

I'm curious how people here feel about it.

Do you think the ecosystem is truly ready for a Wayland-only desktop now?

Things I'm wondering about:

• Remote desktop workflows
• NVIDIA users
• Older apps that still expect X11 behavior
• Power-user tooling

I've been trying to understand the technical side of the transition and wrote a small breakdown while digging into GNOME 50 internals if anyone is interested.

(happy to share it in the comments)

Nautilus was saying like 50 files a second for about 100k files. An "rm -rf" command takes a few seconds at most. Hell, I deleted two Linux installations accidentally a few days ago and it took under 5 seconds. Such a massive slowdown by Nautilus seems like the Gnome team is doing something very wrong.