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.
throw0101d 4 hours ago [-]
The mention of XQuartz (for macOS) reminded me to check that, and 2.8.6 was released mid-July:
omg, it's been over a decade since I have last used XQuartz. Did they finally open source the whole quartz-wm?
throw0101d 3 hours 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]
Ah, I can see that the binary blob is not needed anymore. Nice.
Narishma 57 minutes ago [-]
This is a much more substantial changelog than I was expecting for something that is often presented as a deprecated project.
noosphr 4 minutes ago [-]
Redhat stands to lose their defacto control over X after the XLibre fork so they have to stop trying to kill it. Who would have thought that competition would make things better for everyone?
qwertox 30 minutes ago [-]
It basically is a deprecated project.
kobbs 4 hours ago [-]
Intel modesetting driver with tearfree support in a xorg release!
jck86 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.
noosphr 3 minutes ago [-]
Luckily there is XLibre if the xorg developers can't develop X any more.
BadBadJellyBean 1 hours 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.
vondur 1 hours 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.
34 minutes ago [-]
tyzoid 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't most of this already in xlibre?
nazgulsenpai 3 hours 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.
wing-_-nuts 2 hours ago [-]
>I'm not some anti-wayland zealot but you will pry xfce out of my cold dead hands.
Hard same. I'm using xfce on my laptop with mint xfce edition, and it's a breath of fresh air. Everything just works how you'd expect it to work, and it gets out of your way.
I tried sway a couple years ago and I lost count of the number of things I needed to go and find wayland specific workarounds for. I know things have gotten better since then, but I didn't see any benefit to switching and a whole lot of hassle.
ToyKeeper 13 minutes ago [-]
X11 was 21 years old when the Wayland folks decided it was obsolete and needed to be replaced.
Wayland is now about 18 years old. So, by Wayland standards, only 3 more years until it, too, will be obsolete and need to be replaced.
That day can't come soon enough. :D
Maybe the next one will actually be able to do the things I need a display system to do. Until then, at least we've still got X11. And Wayland has taught everyone all sorts of things about what not to do.
tomstockmail 3 hours ago [-]
Xorg has had releases for years and will continue to do so. But as you can see in the announcement, enterprise users are the driving factor.
nazgulsenpai 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but they haven't added any features in years, from what I assumed to be a maintenance only/feature frozen stance in favor of Wayland, which is (primarily) why xlibre forked.
abenga 3 hours ago [-]
Even xfce will one day move to Wayland.
wing-_-nuts 2 hours 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!'
M95D 2 hours ago [-]
I think it was the "security" argument. Some magic words like "security" and "protect the children" make most people go insane, abandon all reason.
wing-_-nuts 2 hours ago [-]
You'll excuse me if I am not terribly enthusiastic about breaking all sorts of functionality to solve a security problem I've never experienced in my 25 years on linux.
dralley 2 hours ago [-]
Xorg's security (and X11 in general) is objectively terrible - this is not even a debatable question.
wing-_-nuts 2 hours ago [-]
Great, so let wayland be a hardened option for those who care.
mort96 2 hours ago [-]
It is and you're free to use X if you want
nazgulsenpai 1 hours ago [-]
IMO the issue is that the same group stewarding Wayland was also xorg, and intentionally stifled improvement on xorg even when the work just a matter of merging the PR.
mort96 35 minutes ago [-]
Merging a PR by drive-by contributors is far from trivial. As the maintainer, you become responsible for the other person's code for all eternity; it's on you to read it, understand it, update it when stuff around it changes, and fix it when it breaks.
Not a problem for obviously-correct changes of a couple of lines, but most PRs aren't like that.
nazgulsenpai 12 minutes ago [-]
I understand and that's a fair point. I should have phrased that differently, in that the PRs for features were waiting to be merged. I'm sure merging into a codebase as... storied? as xorg is no small task.
dralley 51 minutes ago [-]
>and intentionally stifled improvement on xorg
Open source developers are not required to spend their time prioritizing your priorities. You just have to look to Xlibre to see that a lot of contributions are quite bad quality, and in a C codebase of Xorg's complexity and security profile it's not a small job to review things.
nazgulsenpai 16 minutes ago [-]
Nothing I said in any way implied that freedesktop should be required to do anything. I can't speak to the quality of xlibre merges, only that if whatever is going on over there led to improvements in xorg after a drought, that's a good thing.
wing-_-nuts 1 hours ago [-]
If wayland had been sold as a hardened display for those who needed that level of security, I would not have a problem with it.
As it is, the community got constantly browbeat with 'this is the future' and 'it's so much faster!' when recent benchmarks have proven that to be false.
mort96 39 minutes ago [-]
Then go use X. Nobody's stopping you, you can just ignore any brow beating. /ignore is a useful IRC command.
You'll probably find it to be a not great experience, since almost all the people who spend their time actually working on graphics and GUIs in the Linux world prefer to work on Wayland. So X doesn't get much love these days (and you're not entitled to their efforts after all). But it's not like they erased all the old X code from existence.
dralley 2 hours ago [-]
Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol.
A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not.
I find it quite funny that many of the same people that rag on systemd and say it does too many things, are big fans of Xorg doing a bunch of things that "display server" probably should not be handling.
Even if Wayland was a "display server", it would still "remove existing functionality" if it meant that in any principled sense, because "display server" is only half of what Xorg does.
But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.
wing-_-nuts 2 hours ago [-]
>Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol.
I, as an end user, do NOT care.
>A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not.
I also don't care about ivory tower ideals of what is within the dominion of 'display' and what is not. The fact of the matter is their changes broke a ton of functionality, and instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs.
I have no idea why the community didn't take one look at their proposal and flatly ignore them.
setopt 1 hours ago [-]
> instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs.
In other words, the Wayland people should perhaps have defined official protocol extensions early on to cover most of what X did, thus preventing all the initial interop issues when Gnome and KDE and Sway tried to reinvent them independently.
Anonyneko 55 minutes ago [-]
The community doesn't really have a say because Xorg is effectively on life support and the Xorg devs are now working on Wayland. There aren't many people in this world who could keep Xorg going. Some distros are sticking to Xorg, but it will become more and more difficult in the coming years.
toast0 43 minutes ago [-]
People keep saying Xorg will stop working, but it has yet to turn into a pumpkin, so I dunno man.
Can it do new things? Eh, probably not. Do I need it to do new things? Not really.
Anonyneko 38 minutes ago [-]
Not in the short-term, for sure, and probably not even in the mid-term. But hardware keeps changing, and at some point nobody will care enough (or be able) to implement proper support for it in X (or proper support of X in that hardware). Hopefully we still have at least a decade of X though.
cschep 1 hours ago [-]
If nothing else this is a very strong commentary on just how challenging landing positive changes in Xorg felt to the community.
skydhash 1 hours ago [-]
This pretty much. Xorg got almost everything that I care about to have a functionning GUI. You only startx and the only thing you may need are utils programs like a wm, a compositor, a bar… now you have conflicting implementation from gnome, kde, wlroots,… each with its own set of features.
wing-_-nuts 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, instead of the wayland folks leading the effort to fix issues, it's often some individual DE / WM going off, fixing it the way they prefer, and wayland grudgingly adopting it as official because they know the ecosystem is fragmenting bad enough as it is.
drmr 1 hours ago [-]
And this transition is nowhere near done. Just look at Kicad and pretty much any DAW that loads audio plugins (to name two major usecases where Wayland simply doesn't cut it).
Sure Xwayland exists and mostly (not entirely) works, but that's a band-aid for what is essentially a "we broke it and don't care" approach.
Blackthorn 41 minutes ago [-]
The daw problem is really really bad too. We've got a de facto standard forming right now where you link libwayland.so and hope the structs never ever ever change in the next 30 years.
wing-_-nuts 1 hours ago [-]
Also, as benchmarks show, xwayland introduces pretty bad latency..
dralley 49 minutes ago [-]
The latency isn't that bad, it's reasonable for a compatibility shim.
mzajc 30 minutes ago [-]
> Wayland is not a "display server", it's a display protocol.
This is a huge part of what "user/dev hostile" means in my book; with Wayland, getting a working desktop always someone else's responsibility, all features have to be reimplemented across DEs endlessly (with often-incompatible variations, of course), and they all blame each other and program authors for bugs while the Wayland project refuses to even acknowledge basic features like desktop automation or screen recording.
> But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.
And this irks me too, people are convinced they're done but I still don't have xmacro. And flameshot is broken, while the alternatives suck. And support for everything depends on the DE now. And java.awt.Robot is broken with no replacement. And the clipboard randomly misses copies. And OBS screen recording is broken for me. And there's no support for display resolution scaling. And ssh -X is gone, while waypipe doesn't work all programs.
But hey, at least there's HDR now or something! It was definitely worth replacing a functioning stack for this. I'm so glad that Plasma 6.8 removes X support!
doublerabbit 39 minutes ago [-]
> For the life of me, I'll never understand how wayland got traction with the community.
Corporate drive. Originally sponsored by Intel followed by IBM (RedHat) and the rest followed suit.
dormento 5 minutes ago [-]
Money, the "cure" to the hacker ethos.
dredmorbius 13 minutes ago [-]
Sauce?
doublerabbit 3 minutes ago [-]
I can't link any reddit link now without being asked to login and it appears they've now nuked old.reddit
* 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
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/index.html
> OSI approved Yes
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License
I'm all for people switching to wayland but there should be choice and xorg should not be neglected for ideological reasons.
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.
I'm not some anti-wayland zealot but you will pry xfce out of my cold dead hands.
Hard same. I'm using xfce on my laptop with mint xfce edition, and it's a breath of fresh air. Everything just works how you'd expect it to work, and it gets out of your way.
I tried sway a couple years ago and I lost count of the number of things I needed to go and find wayland specific workarounds for. I know things have gotten better since then, but I didn't see any benefit to switching and a whole lot of hassle.
Wayland is now about 18 years old. So, by Wayland standards, only 3 more years until it, too, will be obsolete and need to be replaced.
That day can't come soon enough. :D
Maybe the next one will actually be able to do the things I need a display system to do. Until then, at least we've still got X11. And Wayland has taught everyone all sorts of things about what not to do.
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!'
Not a problem for obviously-correct changes of a couple of lines, but most PRs aren't like that.
Open source developers are not required to spend their time prioritizing your priorities. You just have to look to Xlibre to see that a lot of contributions are quite bad quality, and in a C codebase of Xorg's complexity and security profile it's not a small job to review things.
As it is, the community got constantly browbeat with 'this is the future' and 'it's so much faster!' when recent benchmarks have proven that to be false.
You'll probably find it to be a not great experience, since almost all the people who spend their time actually working on graphics and GUIs in the Linux world prefer to work on Wayland. So X doesn't get much love these days (and you're not entitled to their efforts after all). But it's not like they erased all the old X code from existence.
A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not.
I find it quite funny that many of the same people that rag on systemd and say it does too many things, are big fans of Xorg doing a bunch of things that "display server" probably should not be handling.
Even if Wayland was a "display server", it would still "remove existing functionality" if it meant that in any principled sense, because "display server" is only half of what Xorg does.
But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.
I, as an end user, do NOT care.
>A lot of the "existing functionality" that it broke has nothing to do with displays, it's stuff that got crammed into Xorg at some point whether it made sense or not.
I also don't care about ivory tower ideals of what is within the dominion of 'display' and what is not. The fact of the matter is their changes broke a ton of functionality, and instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs.
I have no idea why the community didn't take one look at their proposal and flatly ignore them.
In other words, the Wayland people should perhaps have defined official protocol extensions early on to cover most of what X did, thus preventing all the initial interop issues when Gnome and KDE and Sway tried to reinvent them independently.
Can it do new things? Eh, probably not. Do I need it to do new things? Not really.
Sure Xwayland exists and mostly (not entirely) works, but that's a band-aid for what is essentially a "we broke it and don't care" approach.
This is a huge part of what "user/dev hostile" means in my book; with Wayland, getting a working desktop always someone else's responsibility, all features have to be reimplemented across DEs endlessly (with often-incompatible variations, of course), and they all blame each other and program authors for bugs while the Wayland project refuses to even acknowledge basic features like desktop automation or screen recording.
> But sure, the transition was difficult and took a long time.
And this irks me too, people are convinced they're done but I still don't have xmacro. And flameshot is broken, while the alternatives suck. And support for everything depends on the DE now. And java.awt.Robot is broken with no replacement. And the clipboard randomly misses copies. And OBS screen recording is broken for me. And there's no support for display resolution scaling. And ssh -X is gone, while waypipe doesn't work all programs.
But hey, at least there's HDR now or something! It was definitely worth replacing a functioning stack for this. I'm so glad that Plasma 6.8 removes X support!
Corporate drive. Originally sponsored by Intel followed by IBM (RedHat) and the rest followed suit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1m0ztn/how_is_waylan...
AwesomeWM for me. I've essentially fused with it. Warts and all.