GNOME 50 Drops X11. The GNOME Foundation Drops Trust.
GNOME 50 shipped March 18 without X11. Three directors burned. 33% of staff cut. $105,000 on payroll. Fedora 44 and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will deliver it next week.
Three Executive Directors in three years. One desktop release that drops twenty years of X11.
GNOME 50 shipped upstream on March 18. Next week, it lands inside Fedora 44 and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. X11 is gone. That is the hardest technical call the GNOME engineering team has made in a decade. The Foundation, whose job is to carry that news to users, just fired the people who would have carried it. I have watched Linux foundations wobble since I started shipping Linux in 2004. I have not watched one come apart this publicly while the code keeps getting better.
This is the story of a release that works, and a foundation that no longer does.