The GNOME Project announced today the alpha version of the upcoming GNOME 50 desktop environment series for public testing to give the community a first taste of the new features and enhancements.

The biggest change of the upcoming GNOME 50 desktop environment series is the removal of X11 support in various core components, which was initially planned for the GNOME 49 release, as GNOME is going Wayland-only from here on, except for the ability to launch other X11 desktop sessions with a per-user X server.

The GNOME 50 release also promises initial support for a session save/restore functionality, a new gnome-headless-session@<username>.service that makes it easier to start a headless graphical session (i.e. for RDP purposes), and support for the new “boot_display” sysfs attribute from Linux kernel 6.18 LTS in GDM.