GNOME 49 will arrive in the fourth quarter of 2025, and among its new features is one that won't be universally appreciated: by default, Xorg will no longer be an option; the session will be disabled, and the user will need to make adjustments to recover it. With such a significant change, it remained to be seen what Canonical, the company that develops the most popular Linux-based operating system, was planning to do, and now we have the answer: Ubuntu 25.10 says goodbye to Xorg.
So what has commented Jean Baptiste in the Ubuntu talk, where he spoke about the benefits of Wayland and explained the position of not wasting time and energy on a session that isn't used much anymore. Or at least, one that doesn't receive much attention anymore. Therefore, starting in October 2025, Wayland will be the only option default in the main edition, the one that uses GNOME.
Ubuntu 25.10 says goodbye to Xorg
«Over the past few cycles, the Wayland experience has matured significantly, including better Nvidia driver support, a more robust security model, stable support for most everyday workflows, better graphics stack isolation, and improvements to touch and HiDPI display support.
Meanwhile, maintaining both X11 and Wayland sessions creates technical debt and increases maintenance burden, limiting our ability to innovate efficiently.
GNOME plans to remove support for Xorg in GNOME 49. In Ubuntu 25.10, we will take a proactive step to prepare our users and ecosystem before that deadline.«.
What does this mean for users? In most cases, nothing.Ubuntu adopted Wayland by default almost 8 years ago, and it's not noticeable unless you use an app that doesn't play nice with that protocol. In my case, the only thing I noticed was that SimpleScreenRecorder, which was my favorite screen recorder, didn't work, and I had to look for alternatives; I don't remember anything else.
Furthermore, installing Xorg will continue to be an option, even if Canonical and GNOME have turned their backs on it. Other editions like Lubuntu or Xubuntu will continue to offer X11, and Debian, on which Ubuntu is based, will keep it, I'd say, forever.
In any case, Ubuntu 25.10 Questing Quokka will arrive in October 2025 without Xorg by default, following in the footsteps of GNOME and other distributions such as Fedora.