The GNOME 49 Alpha release isn't expected until the end of June but for facilitating additional testing and a number of prominent changes this cycle, a number of GNOME packages have begun releasing "GNOME 49 Alpha 0" tags as part of plans to issue multiple alpha releases this cycle. Notable for GNOME 49 are plans moving forward for disabling X11 session support by default with that code then likely to be removed entirely with GNOME 50 for a Wayland-only desktop.

Released overnight was GNOME Mutter 49.alpha.0 with now supporting xdg_toplevel edge constraints, support for tablet pad relative dials, the Wayland top-level tag protocol is now supported, support for YUV422 and YUV444 handling,introducing the Mutter SDK, dropping the X11 session restore functionality, support for the color-representation protocol, implementing native backlight support in Mutter itself, and disabling the X11 backend by default.

Also released in the early hours of today was GNOME Shell 49.alpha.0 with porting to the new backlight API, bug fixes, and other enhancements.

Released earlier in the week was GNOME-Session 49.alpha.0 and most notable there is X11 session support being disabled by default.

GNOME developer Jordan Petridis also published a blog post today on the status of the X11 GNOME session removal. He reaffirmed the project's plans of GNOME 49 expected to ship with the X11 session disabled by default. The removal of the X11 support code could take place for GNOME 49 but may be staved off until the GNOME 50 cycle depending upon how the situation plays out.

The GNOME 49 Alpha is expected in late June, the GNOME 49 Beta in early August, the GNOME 49 release candidate at the end of August, and then GNOME 49.0 should be out on 17 September with the X11 session disabled by default. In turn GNOME 49 will be found in the likes of Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10.