Ubuntu 25.10 drops support for GNOME on Xorg

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With Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka,” we are taking a significant step forward in the evolution of the Ubuntu Desktop by removing the Xorg-based Ubuntu session. Starting with this release the “Ubuntu” session in GDM will run exclusively on Wayland.

This decision follows upstream GNOME’s roadmap and aligns with our long-term strategy of delivering a secure, performant, and modern desktop experience.

Why We’re Making This Change

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.

Why Ubuntu 25.10?

Ubuntu 25.10 is the last interim release before our next LTS (Ubuntu 26.04). By moving now, we give developers and users a full cycle to adapt before the next LTS, align with GNOME 49 and reduce fragmentation while simplifying our support matrix heading into the LTS.

What This Means in Practice

The login screen (powered by GDM) will no longer offer the Ubuntu on Xorg option.

All sessions based on GNOME Shell and Mutter are now Wayland-only and users who rely on X11-specific behaviors will not be able to use the GNOME desktop environment on Xorg.

If you still need X11

We understand that some users still depend on Xorg’s implementation of X11; for example, in remote desktop setups, or highly specialized workflows.

If you require Xorg specifically, you can install and use a non-GNOME desktop environment. Xorg itself is not going away, only GNOME’s support for Xorg.

This doesn’t mean X11 applications won’t work anymore on Ubuntu. X11 is supported by XWayland and most X11 applications will run on the Ubuntu Wayland session transparently. In many cases, no changes are needed.

Where to Report Bugs and Get Help

If you run into issues or regressions after the switch, you can file bugs via Launchpad using the Ubuntu bug reporting tool (ubuntu-bug from a terminal), and participate in discussions or get help on Ubuntu Discourse, Matrix or Ask Ubuntu.

If you’re an application or toolkit developer, please test your software with Wayland and report any compatibility issues you may find.

Onward together

This transition marks a new era for Ubuntu Desktop: modern and aligned with the direction of the broader Linux ecosystem. We understand that change can be disruptive, but we’re confident that the benefits of Wayland make this the right time.

We will continue to monitor feedback and ensure Ubuntu remains the most accessible and productive open-source desktop for everyone.

Thank you for being part of the journey.

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This also means that the xorg-server source package and all its binary packages will move from main to universe this cycle, right?

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I have seen concerns from Nvidia users a couple of times recently so want to add some detail about that.

Most users of Ubuntu with Nvidia hardware seem to be running 24.04, just like most users of Ubuntu itself. As such they will not yet have noticed all the stabilisation work that went into making Wayland the default for Nvidia in 24.10. And as of right now in June 2025, the list of unsolved issues on Nvidia is tiny.

Nvidia itself has a list of features that are not yet available, but we don’t expect most desktop users to be concerned with those. Especially a year from now, which is the soonest most Ubuntu users will experience the removal of Xorg.

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Come 25.10 release week, I shall pop open a bottle of fine Port wine and raise a toast to bid farewell to good old xkill, one of the classic X11, erm, killer apps. xkill was good, loyal, and never budged or showed mercy when sent on its missions*.

*Not that I’ve used it in the past decade or so. But back in the old days, it was always handy.

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On a slightly less-jocular note, what is the current status of Accessibility on Wayland? The only major hurdle I’ve noticed with it in the past few years is that most of the common Accessibility stack wasn’t functional on Wayland.

Accessibility is important for end users, but also for deployments in businesses and public institutions.

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If you can be more specific then please log each issue as a Launchpad bug, and tag it with “a11y”.

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That kinda kills the hope i had for x11 on 26.04 :frowning:

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It didn’t close that option.

I’ve seen nothing yet that would prevent other desktop/WMs being used on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

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so an older GDM/GNOME on 26.04? or maybe the option to implement it into GNOME themselves?

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Other desktop environments obviously means non-GNOME ones …

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No, I was suggest non-GNOME desktops; eg. I’m using questing right now with the LXQt desktop; but if I’d logged in with an Xfce session I’d likewise be using Xorg. I also have a number of WMs installed which would be using Xorg.

This Lubuntu session will likely be using Wayland before Lubuntu 25.10 releases, as I’m very aware of work ongoing in getting that fully functional, but I don’t see all Xorg options disappearing being my point.

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Oh yea i realize that other desktops will work with x11, especially as some of them only run on it. I might give Kubuntu a shot, but im already looking into other options.

Upgrading is not an option for me, as i don’t like to mess with multiple desktops on the
same installation. Unless im going to give Wayland a shot in years time.

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Congratulations on finally hitting this milestone and shipping a release that doesn’t need Xorg to function. Is the Kubuntu team also looking at shipping only a Wayland session as well? The kwin compositor seems to be breaking out X11 functionality with the goal of dropping it in a future release.

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I am using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and I am concerned about this planned removal of X.org support. Wayland works well… in general, but for me there are 3 important types of applications which I use regularly and have problems or do not work with Wayland:

  • Visio-conferencing (zoom, kMeet from Infomaniak): impossible to share a screen under wayland
  • Remote access (I am using Anydesk regularly to help people out, and it seems not to work properly with Wayland, but I need to check it again).
  • OpenLP (a Church song projection software)
    Will these limitations of Wayland be overcome in the future?
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I’m sure that main applications will soon switch to use the portals for this, since that’s the only really safe, efficient and supported in the long run way for doing this.

A part there are plenty of options that are open for this nowadays, but if you want an easy cross-platform commercial solution TeamViewer just works perfectly in wayland (I tested this recently)

I assume this requires XWayland in case, and will probably work acceptably, if not I feel that upstream will start to hurry up to work on supporting it :slight_smile:

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This also means that the xorg-server source package and all its binary packages will move from main to universe this cycle, right?

Yes

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Regarding remote desktop setups here, this is partially also a Ubuntu-based problem due to Launchpad Bug 2077538 (Hardware acceleration being disabled on solely Debian/Ubuntu), so would be great, if Ubuntu could finally address this.

Another problem is an upstream one under Freedesktops gitlab wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/99: Remote desktop clients under Wayland in general, currently don’t have the ability to tell the compositor (gnome-shell), that a client wants to use multiple monitors in fullscreen (either all, or some, but not all (e.g. monitor 1, monitor 2, but not monitor 3) for their remote desktop session.
For Remmina (Ubuntus default remote desktop client), there is an upstream report for this in Remmina upstream under Bug number 2686. However, Remmina cannot address this, unless there is respective support for this in gtk and mutter, and both mutter and gtk cannot address this without the respective Wayland protocol.

(I’ve changed the links to the bug reports in this post to indirect references, as Discourse otherwise classifies links to bug reports as spam.)

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I’m guessing most remote desktops in the world are actually hosted in the cloud now. And the thing about VMs in the cloud is that most of them don’t have GPUs allocated. It’s a strange way in which the world has gone backwards where our shells are no longer optimised for CPU rendering and a significant user base now needs CPU rendering.

Bug 2077538 is valid but currently only shows “affects 2 people”, so not a popular issue right now. Still, if this is the first time you’re reading this and have a solution then we welcome patches.

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Bug 2077538 is valid but currently only shows “affects 2 people”

Officially in Launchpad, yes. But these are only the people, that actually reported it to Launchpad. Most people unfortunately don’t. For example here, this is described as The other is that performance at 4K/60 is abysmal. From my work and experience in g-r-d, I can tell you everything larger than 1920x1080 requires hardware acceleration for reasonable FPS values.

Another case is mentioned upstream, where an Ubuntu user also reports Still, none of the programs that require hardware acceleration work over remote desktop.

Furthermore, people mention it on askubuntu, like here. (quoting: Can't use GPU with remote login, so need to use desktop sharing. I need Blender to use the GPU, which only seems possible when using desktop sharing rather than remote login.)

While not individually tracked, I also found several reports on reddit in the past. As a result of that, I opened a report upstream here for a discussion about this. However, upstream-wise, I cannot do much here, as the restriction is made downstream in Ubuntu. So, without your [Ubuntus] help, this cannot be solved.

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