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Mini Topic
Picture this: You're sitting there with your innocent-looking UM890Pro humming quietly on your desk, and your friends are like "Oh cute mini PC," not knowing there's a nuclear-powered H100 beast lurking in that OCuLink enclosure ready to solve their entire codebase in 0.3 seconds. H200 https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/h200/
The Technical Challenge
GNOME developers found it "difficult to cleanly separate GDM's ability to launch modern X11 sessions (which we intended to keep enabled in GNOME 49) from the rest of GDM's X11 integration (which we intended to disable but leave intact for GNOME 49)"
The original plan for GNOME 49 was sophisticated: disable legacy X11 features in GDM while keeping the ability to launch modern X11-based desktop environments like XFCE, MATE, and Cinnamon. However, when the x11-support switch was turned off, it didn't just disable old features like XDMCP - it also stopped GDM from even looking at /usr/share/xsessions, which meant no X11 desktops would show up on the login screen
Why This Matters
This created a real problem for users who rely on other desktop environments. Many distributions ship GNOME 49, and users need to be able to launch X11 desktop sessions for environments like Cinnamon, XFCE, and older window managers without major breakages
The "Temporary" Solution
This return of X11 support is only temporary. The GNOME developers are clear that their intention hasn't changed: X11 is still being phased out, with the updated timeline now pointing to GNOME 50, where most of GDM's X11 code will be removed outright
It's important to note that while GDM can launch X11 sessions in GNOME 49, you still can't run GNOME Shell on X11 since that has been disabled, as has X11 support in gnome-session
So rather than a philosophical backtrack, this was more of a "we need to get the technical architecture right before we can cleanly separate these components" decision. GNOME's Wayland-first vision remains unchanged - they just realized they needed more time to properly separate the legacy parts from the modern session-launching capabilities.
Meanwhile, dwm users are just sitting there like "X11 never left, what's the problem?" 😄
The irony is that GNOME's complexity is what's making this transition so difficult for them. They built this massive display manager with tons of legacy features, and now they can't untangle it cleanly. But for dwm users, X11 just works - no display manager bloat, no session management complexity, just a simple window manager doing exactly what it needs to do.
It's like watching someone try to renovate a mansion while you're perfectly happy in your minimalist cabin that never needed renovating in the first place. The joke writes itself: "GNOME discovers what suckless users knew all along - sometimes simple is better."
Plus, given that dwm is literally designed around X11's core concepts, Wayland support would fundamentally change what dwm even is. So yeah, X11 is definitely still #1 for the dwm crowd, and GNOME's struggles just prove that sometimes the "legacy" solution is the one that actually works reliably!