GNOME 49 Alpha is out now, bringing a change that X11 fans may find disappointing

GNOME 49 has reached its first Alpha stage, giving us an early look at what's cooking for the full release this September. While there's a lot of polish happening across the board, the one change that will grab headlines is the project's aggressive push towards a Wayland-only future.

The GNOME Session on X.Org is now disabled by default in key components like GDM and gnome-session. To be clear, your old X11 applications are not suddenly going to break; the XWayland compatibility layer is sticking around.

The reasoning behind the removal, according to the distro's developers, is that GNOME on X11 has become a maintenance burden and receives little testing compared to its Wayland counterpart. This whole removal of X11 is slated for completion in GNOME 50.

Older applications are being replaced with more modern, GTK4-based alternatives. For example, the Totem video player is officially being replaced by Showtime, a change we reported on back in May. Showtime has now joined the core app collection after graduating from the GNOME Incubator program.

There are other replacements like Papers taking over for the Evince document viewer, and a new Manuals app for Devhelp. You'll see plenty of refinement when it comes to the applications the distro ships with. GNOME's web browser, Epiphany, got a major redesign for its address bar.

The humble GNOME Calculator, of all things, received a significant upgrade; it now handles permutations and combinations, and even finds the greatest common divisor. Nautilus, the file manager, now uses transparency to show hidden files. For the developers out there, GNOME Builder now has support for Arduino projects.

Under the hood, Mutter, the window manager, has gotten some updates to make logical monitors more persistent and to apply touchpad acceleration on startup correctly.

The new, Rust-based image loader called Glycin is now the default on Linux, handling a massive list of formats for saving and encoding, from JPEGs to WebP. This also contributes to better memory safety and sandboxing. A Mutter SDK has also been introduced, which should make life easier for devs building tools on top of it.

If you're interested, you can grab the installation images from the GNOME OS project page to test it out yourself. The full list of changes is available here.

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