GNOME 50 “Tokyo” is a Wayland-only desktop
On 18 March 2026 the GNOME Project released GNOME 50 (Tokyo): parental controls, better remote desktop, VRR, and no X11 backend in Mutter.
GNOME 50, codename Tokyo, shipped on 18 March 2026. The name thanks the organizers of GNOME.Asia Summit 2025.
Official highlights from release.gnome.org/50:
- Parental controls: screen-time limits and bedtime lock
- Orca rewrite of preferences, global settings, better Braille and Wayland mouse review
- Reduced Motion accessibility option
- Document Viewer annotations (text, lines, highlights)
- Faster Files, calendar attendee list, ICS export of the whole calendar
- Remote desktop: Vulkan/VA-API encode, HiDPI, camera redirection, Kerberos
- VRR and fractional scaling on by default in more distros
- HDR screen sharing
Community reports also note that Mutter dropped the X11 backend — GNOME 50 is a Wayland-only shell. Fedora 44 and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ship this series.
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