12 ms·

Xorg-server 26.1.0 rc1

139 points by st_goliath 27d ago

kobbs 27d ago
Intel modesetting driver with tearfree support in a xorg release!
- jck86 27d ago
  Hoorah! Hopefully big distros will at least offer an optional upgrade to this. I'm all for people switching to wayland but there should be choice and xorg should not be neglected for ideological reasons.
  - dralley 27d ago
    Xorg isn't neglected for "ideological reasons", it's neglected because development is work - and most of the people with knowledge of the problem domain decided they didn't want to work on Xorg anymore, and most of the companies that were paying for it decided they didn't want to pay for it anymore (apart from baseline maintenance, Xwayland and security fixes). And the people who want Xorg support maintained in perpetuity rarely seem interested in maintaining Xorg themselves, at least not properly (see this history of Xlibre introducing bugs and LLM slop). You are free to spend your own time and resources doing the work, but you don't get to dictate how other people spend theirs.
    - vondur 27d ago
      It looks like it's under more active development currently, however I don't see them adding many big new features at this point.
    - BadBadJellyBean 27d ago
      Exactly. Just think about how much work it was to move from X to Wayland, how Nvidia didn't want to play ball, how different the architectures are, in a world where ossification is very much a thing. AND STILL there was enough momentum to get all the major players on board. I have never done any X programming but it must have been bad when people would so readily jump ship and put all that work in. Same for systemd.
      - wahern 27d ago
        Wayland was simpler because it was just a compositor. It meant people interested in graphics acceleration could focus on just that, iterating faster without the friction of the rest of the stack. But now that the Wayland ecosystem has to reinvent everything else, it's clearly at least as much work, if not more so. The initial switch moved the tightly knit rendering developers to a better local optimum, at the expense of a worse global optimum.
        BadBadJellyBean 27d ago
        It forces some kind of modularity. Maybe that is a good thing. We don't have all features of X11 in Wayland but we also have features in Wayland that are missing in X11. I have been on Wayland for a while now and I can't say I am really suffering. There are some tings I'd like improved further but the protocol is evolving all the time. I think we'll get there. Also the decision is already made by the big distros anyways. They seem to be mostly happy.
        wahern 27d ago
        > It forces some kind of modularity. Wayland is the complete opposite of modular; that's why the compositor has to handle everything. The claimed problem with X11 was it was too modular, easy for different clients to control various aspects of the environment, but perhaps too easy, lacking a security policy framework to limit client access. (Or at least a framework that was fully baked. Wayland put an end to such initiatives.) The lack of modularity in Wayland has been widening the rift between the desktop environments. It's as-if KDE and GNOME each forked X11 and went their own ways.
        throwaway84932 27d ago
        > Wayland is the complete opposite of modular Not true. Wayland simply cuts out the middleman. Making the compositor the display server is one of the best things Wayland did. This brings so many advantages, such as true tear-free graphics and lower input latency.
    - noosphr 27d ago
      Luckily there is XLibre if the xorg developers can't develop X any more.
      - preisschild 27d ago
        [flagged]
        deleted 27d ago
        [deleted]
        farlight 27d ago
        I don't care about either X, but that guy's name is in this release, and judging purely by the number of commits (since I lack X expertise to judge any other way), he seems to be the top contributor. Looks like there's no way you can avoid "conspiracy theorists" if you want to use X, including Xwayland, eh?
        ToyKeeper 27d ago
        Metux (Enrico Weigelt) was banned from the Xorg project because his patches kept breaking things, often in ways which demonstrated he didn't even do the bare minimum before pushing commits. Like, adding code which didn't even compile. It's fascinating to look through the huge pile of commits they had to revert after banning him, to see how bad a lot of it is. I picked a few at random, and ... wow. So he started his own fork. The ban didn't seem to have any relation to politics or personal behavior. However, he was widely known for being ... how to put it in a way which is acceptable here ... uh, difficult to deal with. Like, after Linus Torvalds made a vow to be nicer, he made an exception just one time... for metux. He was the only person obnoxious enough to get Linus to break his vow. Which, if I recall correctly, was how he ended up focusing on the Xorg project. After getting booted from Linux, he picked a different project. That's who is in charge of XLibre. Things didn't get political until he announced the fork. Because, although politics had nothing to do with him getting banned (either time), he framed it as if he was being targeted for political reasons, and used inflammatory political language in the project's documentation. This gained a lot of attention and caused a lot of controversy, and also had the effect of ensuring the contributors all had mostly the same political views. Anyway, the number of commits doesn't tell much of the story. The content of the commits (especially the reverted ones at Xorg) are far more enlightening.
    - rabf 27d ago
      Modesetting work was done in 2022, but for some reason no one had released a new stable release of the Xserver with this patch included since then. This was one of the reasons Xlibre was created, there was all these improvements to Xorg sitting ready for release but never being released.
- deleted 27d ago
  [deleted]
throw0101d 27d ago
The mention of XQuartz (for macOS) reminded me to check that, and 2.8.6 was released mid-July: * https://www.xquartz.org/releases/bare/XQuartz-2.8.6.html https://www.xquartz.org/releases/bare/XQuartz-2.8.6.html Previously 2.8.5 was out in 2023: * https://www.xquartz.org/releases/bare/XQuartz-2.8.5.html https://www.xquartz.org/releases/bare/XQuartz-2.8.5.html There's a XQuartz 2.8.7 beta as well (xorg-server 26.1 rebase): * https://www.xquartz.org/releases/index.html https://www.xquartz.org/releases/index.html
- egorfine 27d ago
  omg, it's been over a decade since I have last used XQuartz. Did they finally open source the whole quartz-wm?
  - throw0101d 27d ago
    > An XQuartz installation consists of many individual pieces of software which have various licenses. The X.Org software components’ licenses are discussed on the X.Org Foundation Licenses page.[1] The quartz-wm[2] window manager included with the XQuartz distribution uses the Apple Public Source License Version 2.[3] * https://www.xquartz.org/index.html https://www.xquartz.org/index.html
    - panzi 27d ago
      Just looked it up, that Apple license is indeed approved as open source/free software by the FSF and OSI!
      - throw0101d 27d ago
        > FSF approved Yes (Version 2.0, not versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2)[2][3] > OSI approved Yes * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License
    - egorfine 27d ago
      Ah, I can see that the binary blob is not needed anymore. Nice.
tyzoid 27d ago
Isn't most of this already in xlibre?
- nazgulsenpai 27d ago
  People have all kind of opinions about xlibre as a project and the politics around it that I'm not interested in, but if they're driving xorg to improve, that's a good thing. I'm not some anti-wayland zealot but you will pry xfce out of my cold dead hands.
  - redsocksfan45 27d ago
    [dead]
  - abenga 27d ago
    Even xfce will one day move to Wayland.
    - nazgulsenpai 27d ago
      And I'll be there.
    - boudin 27d ago
      There's already and experimental support no?
    - wing-_-nuts 27d ago
      With a project as user/dev hostile as wayland, it's much better to be a 'last mover' than first. For the life of me, I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community. 'Hey guys, we decided to implement a display server from scratch! We broke a ton of existing functionality and made a ton of low level stuff that X used to handle the responsibility of WM/DE devs!'
      - naikrovek 27d ago
        [dead]
self_awareness 27d ago
Duplicate functionality compared to XLibre was reimplemented here from scratch, or sourced from XLibre?
- saelthavron 27d ago
  At least one was looks like it was sourced from XLibre: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/pull/1314 https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/pull/1314
- thesuitonym 27d ago
  Pulling good ideas from downstream forks is actually kind of what open source is all about, isn't it?
Narishma 27d ago
This is a much more substantial changelog than I was expecting for something that is often presented as a deprecated project.
- qwertox 27d ago
  It basically is a deprecated project.
  - mmh0000 27d ago
    That's a new take: Project with new release 1 day ago declared deprecated! I've been using Linux for around 2 decades. I am currently running Fedora 43/KDE Plasma ... and wait for it ... Xorg. Why? Because it works. It works well! Why don't I use Wayland? Because it breaks everything. - Screensharing is just wonky and inconsistent across applications. It has gotten better in the last 2 years, but it's still quite wonky. And janky. And flobby. I **could** put effort into fixing this, but it already works in Xorg. - I have a bunch of Xorg/xdotool scripts bound to hotkeys. Move, resize windows. If AppX is running and the window isn't shown, show it; otherwise, hide it. If AppX and AppY are both running and meta+y is pressed, then tile in a specific way, else do something different. These scripts are either ungodly difficult to rewrite to work in Wayland or just flat-out impossible in the name of "security". - Easystroke. https://github.com/mmh0000/easystroke . Nothing like that exists on Wayland (that actually works). And I can not live without it after having it for 20 years.
    - lenkite 26d ago
      What does easystroke even do ? There is no README in the repo.
      - mmh0000 26d ago
        Sorry. Easystroke is a mouse-gesture program: hold button, draw various lines or shapes, release button. Triggers any action. Like window minimize, execute command This is the “official” repo but it was abandoned long ago: https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke My first linked repo is me and Claude working to fix build errors and app bugs to keep it running.
vkaku 27d ago
I'll wait to pick up the XLibre version of this with the correct patches.
ToyKeeper 27d ago
Hooray! A new release of Xorg is always a good reason to celebrate. Long live the all-singing all-dancing feature-rich network-transparent display system which is still the best (and often only) solution for a lot of common user needs, even 39 years after its creation.
- ux266478 27d ago
  Well, Quartz is okay too, even though it lacks network transparency. Arcan is looking like a very promising successor to the X protocol and Xorg server. It's not there yet, but it gets closer year after year.
  - bmacho 27d ago
    I think Linux (and other unix-like system) would be best off with something like rio on plan9. The API should look like a file-system hierarchy, and API virtualization/access management/input output hooks and mapping could also be file-system-like.
shrubble 27d ago
Note that Enrico Weigelt is the "XLibre" guy and some of his fixes made it into this release, you can search for his name in the message.
unixhero 27d ago
Out of the loop and this is definitely off topic, but what happened to the Xfree86 project? Is Xorg the same? The venerable xfree86config program is gone from the distrib so I assume it is not the same.
- BeetleB 27d ago
  XFree86 died a long time ago. X.org is its replacement. There was a bunch of infighting as well as a dispute over license changes. People just abandoned it.
  - account42 26d ago
    To be precise, X.org is/was a replacement to the project but a continuation of the software. AKA a fork that won. You sill have the xf86 prefix everywhere in X.org
sbinnee 27d ago
I used to run xorg and wayland together and switch between them because you know you setup xorg no matter what even if you daily drive wayland. Since 2024 or so however I don’t remember opening a xorg session.

139 points by st_goliath 27d ago

kobbs 27d ago

Intel modesetting driver with tearfree support in a xorg release!

jck86 27d ago
Hoorah! Hopefully big distros will at least offer an optional upgrade to this. I'm all for people switching to wayland but there should be choice and xorg should not be neglected for ideological reasons.
- dralley 27d ago
  Xorg isn't neglected for "ideological reasons", it's neglected because development is work - and most of the people with knowledge of the problem domain decided they didn't want to work on Xorg anymore, and most of the companies that were paying for it decided they didn't want to pay for it anymore (apart from baseline maintenance, Xwayland and security fixes). And the people who want Xorg support maintained in perpetuity rarely seem interested in maintaining Xorg themselves, at least not properly (see this history of Xlibre introducing bugs and LLM slop). You are free to spend your own time and resources doing the work, but you don't get to dictate how other people spend theirs.
  - vondur 27d ago
    It looks like it's under more active development currently, however I don't see them adding many big new features at this point.
  - BadBadJellyBean 27d ago
    Exactly. Just think about how much work it was to move from X to Wayland, how Nvidia didn't want to play ball, how different the architectures are, in a world where ossification is very much a thing. AND STILL there was enough momentum to get all the major players on board. I have never done any X programming but it must have been bad when people would so readily jump ship and put all that work in. Same for systemd.
    - wahern 27d ago
      Wayland was simpler because it was just a compositor. It meant people interested in graphics acceleration could focus on just that, iterating faster without the friction of the rest of the stack. But now that the Wayland ecosystem has to reinvent everything else, it's clearly at least as much work, if not more so. The initial switch moved the tightly knit rendering developers to a better local optimum, at the expense of a worse global optimum.
      - BadBadJellyBean 27d ago
        It forces some kind of modularity. Maybe that is a good thing. We don't have all features of X11 in Wayland but we also have features in Wayland that are missing in X11. I have been on Wayland for a while now and I can't say I am really suffering. There are some tings I'd like improved further but the protocol is evolving all the time. I think we'll get there. Also the decision is already made by the big distros anyways. They seem to be mostly happy.
        wahern 27d ago
        > It forces some kind of modularity. Wayland is the complete opposite of modular; that's why the compositor has to handle everything. The claimed problem with X11 was it was too modular, easy for different clients to control various aspects of the environment, but perhaps too easy, lacking a security policy framework to limit client access. (Or at least a framework that was fully baked. Wayland put an end to such initiatives.) The lack of modularity in Wayland has been widening the rift between the desktop environments. It's as-if KDE and GNOME each forked X11 and went their own ways.
        throwaway84932 27d ago
        > Wayland is the complete opposite of modular Not true. Wayland simply cuts out the middleman. Making the compositor the display server is one of the best things Wayland did. This brings so many advantages, such as true tear-free graphics and lower input latency.
  - noosphr 27d ago
    Luckily there is XLibre if the xorg developers can't develop X any more.
    - preisschild 27d ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 27d ago
        [deleted]
      - farlight 27d ago
        I don't care about either X, but that guy's name is in this release, and judging purely by the number of commits (since I lack X expertise to judge any other way), he seems to be the top contributor. Looks like there's no way you can avoid "conspiracy theorists" if you want to use X, including Xwayland, eh?
        ToyKeeper 27d ago
        Metux (Enrico Weigelt) was banned from the Xorg project because his patches kept breaking things, often in ways which demonstrated he didn't even do the bare minimum before pushing commits. Like, adding code which didn't even compile. It's fascinating to look through the huge pile of commits they had to revert after banning him, to see how bad a lot of it is. I picked a few at random, and ... wow. So he started his own fork. The ban didn't seem to have any relation to politics or personal behavior. However, he was widely known for being ... how to put it in a way which is acceptable here ... uh, difficult to deal with. Like, after Linus Torvalds made a vow to be nicer, he made an exception just one time... for metux. He was the only person obnoxious enough to get Linus to break his vow. Which, if I recall correctly, was how he ended up focusing on the Xorg project. After getting booted from Linux, he picked a different project. That's who is in charge of XLibre. Things didn't get political until he announced the fork. Because, although politics had nothing to do with him getting banned (either time), he framed it as if he was being targeted for political reasons, and used inflammatory political language in the project's documentation. This gained a lot of attention and caused a lot of controversy, and also had the effect of ensuring the contributors all had mostly the same political views. Anyway, the number of commits doesn't tell much of the story. The content of the commits (especially the reverted ones at Xorg) are far more enlightening.
  - rabf 27d ago
    Modesetting work was done in 2022, but for some reason no one had released a new stable release of the Xserver with this patch included since then. This was one of the reasons Xlibre was created, there was all these improvements to Xorg sitting ready for release but never being released.
deleted 27d ago
[deleted]

throw0101d 27d ago

The mention of XQuartz (for macOS) reminded me to check that, and 2.8.6 was released mid-July: * https://www.xquartz.org/releases/bare/XQuartz-2.8.6.html https://www.xquartz.org/releases/bare/XQuartz-2.8.6.html Previously 2.8.5 was out in 2023: * https://www.xquartz.org/releases/bare/XQuartz-2.8.5.html https://www.xquartz.org/releases/bare/XQuartz-2.8.5.html There's a XQuartz 2.8.7 beta as well (xorg-server 26.1 rebase): * https://www.xquartz.org/releases/index.html https://www.xquartz.org/releases/index.html

egorfine 27d ago
omg, it's been over a decade since I have last used XQuartz. Did they finally open source the whole quartz-wm?
- throw0101d 27d ago
  > An XQuartz installation consists of many individual pieces of software which have various licenses. The X.Org software components’ licenses are discussed on the X.Org Foundation Licenses page.[1] The quartz-wm[2] window manager included with the XQuartz distribution uses the Apple Public Source License Version 2.[3] * https://www.xquartz.org/index.html https://www.xquartz.org/index.html
  - panzi 27d ago
    Just looked it up, that Apple license is indeed approved as open source/free software by the FSF and OSI!
    - throw0101d 27d ago
      > FSF approved Yes (Version 2.0, not versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2)[2][3] > OSI approved Yes * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License
  - egorfine 27d ago
    Ah, I can see that the binary blob is not needed anymore. Nice.

tyzoid 27d ago

Isn't most of this already in xlibre?

nazgulsenpai 27d ago
People have all kind of opinions about xlibre as a project and the politics around it that I'm not interested in, but if they're driving xorg to improve, that's a good thing. I'm not some anti-wayland zealot but you will pry xfce out of my cold dead hands.
- redsocksfan45 27d ago
  [dead]
- abenga 27d ago
  Even xfce will one day move to Wayland.
  - nazgulsenpai 27d ago
    And I'll be there.
  - boudin 27d ago
    There's already and experimental support no?
  - wing-_-nuts 27d ago
    With a project as user/dev hostile as wayland, it's much better to be a 'last mover' than first. For the life of me, I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community. 'Hey guys, we decided to implement a display server from scratch! We broke a ton of existing functionality and made a ton of low level stuff that X used to handle the responsibility of WM/DE devs!'
    - naikrovek 27d ago
      [dead]

self_awareness 27d ago

Duplicate functionality compared to XLibre was reimplemented here from scratch, or sourced from XLibre?

saelthavron 27d ago
At least one was looks like it was sourced from XLibre: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/pull/1314 https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/pull/1314
thesuitonym 27d ago
Pulling good ideas from downstream forks is actually kind of what open source is all about, isn't it?

Narishma 27d ago

This is a much more substantial changelog than I was expecting for something that is often presented as a deprecated project.

qwertox 27d ago
It basically is a deprecated project.
- mmh0000 27d ago
  That's a new take: Project with new release 1 day ago declared deprecated! I've been using Linux for around 2 decades. I am currently running Fedora 43/KDE Plasma ... and wait for it ... Xorg. Why? Because it works. It works well! Why don't I use Wayland? Because it breaks everything. - Screensharing is just wonky and inconsistent across applications. It has gotten better in the last 2 years, but it's still quite wonky. And janky. And flobby. I **could** put effort into fixing this, but it already works in Xorg. - I have a bunch of Xorg/xdotool scripts bound to hotkeys. Move, resize windows. If AppX is running and the window isn't shown, show it; otherwise, hide it. If AppX and AppY are both running and meta+y is pressed, then tile in a specific way, else do something different. These scripts are either ungodly difficult to rewrite to work in Wayland or just flat-out impossible in the name of "security". - Easystroke. https://github.com/mmh0000/easystroke . Nothing like that exists on Wayland (that actually works). And I can not live without it after having it for 20 years.
  - lenkite 26d ago
    What does easystroke even do ? There is no README in the repo.
    - mmh0000 26d ago
      Sorry. Easystroke is a mouse-gesture program: hold button, draw various lines or shapes, release button. Triggers any action. Like window minimize, execute command This is the “official” repo but it was abandoned long ago: https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke My first linked repo is me and Claude working to fix build errors and app bugs to keep it running.

vkaku 27d ago

I'll wait to pick up the XLibre version of this with the correct patches.

ToyKeeper 27d ago

Hooray! A new release of Xorg is always a good reason to celebrate. Long live the all-singing all-dancing feature-rich network-transparent display system which is still the best (and often only) solution for a lot of common user needs, even 39 years after its creation.

ux266478 27d ago
Well, Quartz is okay too, even though it lacks network transparency. Arcan is looking like a very promising successor to the X protocol and Xorg server. It's not there yet, but it gets closer year after year.
- bmacho 27d ago
  I think Linux (and other unix-like system) would be best off with something like rio on plan9. The API should look like a file-system hierarchy, and API virtualization/access management/input output hooks and mapping could also be file-system-like.

shrubble 27d ago

Note that Enrico Weigelt is the "XLibre" guy and some of his fixes made it into this release, you can search for his name in the message.

unixhero 27d ago

Out of the loop and this is definitely off topic, but what happened to the Xfree86 project? Is Xorg the same? The venerable xfree86config program is gone from the distrib so I assume it is not the same.

BeetleB 27d ago
XFree86 died a long time ago. X.org is its replacement. There was a bunch of infighting as well as a dispute over license changes. People just abandoned it.
- account42 26d ago
  To be precise, X.org is/was a replacement to the project but a continuation of the software. AKA a fork that won. You sill have the xf86 prefix everywhere in X.org

sbinnee 27d ago

I used to run xorg and wayland together and switch between them because you know you setup xorg no matter what even if you daily drive wayland. Since 2024 or so however I don’t remember opening a xorg session.