X.Org Server Development Slows To Lowest Point In A Decade

[phoronix]

Phoronix: X.Org Server Development Slows To Lowest Point In A Decade

The maturing of Wayland (and Mir) as well as external projects like libinput have clearly had an impact on the X.Org Server's development... In 2015 there were fewer xorg-server commits than any year since 2003. Other indicators also point to dramatically slower X Server development...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XServer-2015-Statistics

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

Personally, I can't say I'm either surprised or sad about this. The X server and protocol are prehistoric behemoths that should be put to rest.

[johnc]

Not too surprising since X.org is already perfect and 100% bug-free.

[uid313]

Hopefully they remove some old extensions.
And kill DRI and DRI2 in favor of DRI3 solely.
Then kill of everything else unnecessary and make X.Org very slim and light and easy to maintain by getting away as much cruft as possible.

[schmidtbag]

Hopefully they remove some old extensions.
And kill DRI and DRI2 in favor of DRI3 solely.
Then kill of everything else unnecessary and make X.Org very slim and light and easy to maintain by getting away as much cruft as possible.

I'm not sure if killing off DRI2 is a good idea. Isn't there still modern-ish hardware incompatible with DRI3? I could be wrong - I don't really keep up with that. But yeah, I agree with killing off DRI (1).

At this point, I think X.Org should be intentionally be left "bloated", so it is compatible for legacy devices. Since Wayland is focused on the future of the linux desktop, it makes more sense to me for that to be kept as slim as possible, which so far I'd say it is doing fairly well.

I'd say once LXQt, KDE, and maybe Cinnamon get official stable Wayland support, X.Org can be retired for legacy and compatibility purposes.

[Azrael5]

I dont' understand why they persevere in focus energy on a crappy mechanism instead of centering wayland or mir the only useful place of x11 is the water closet.

[You-]

I dont' understand why they persevere in focus energy on a crappy mechanism instead of centering wayland or mir the only useful place of x11 is the water closet.

One is ready to use now and the other will be ready tomorrow.

Epecially paying customers will want the product they can use.

Besides Wayland/Mir will also re-use much of the X infrastructure.

[caligula]

I dont' understand why they persevere in focus energy on a crappy mechanism instead of centering wayland or mir the only useful place of x11 is the water closet.

99% of users still use X, perhaps?

[Azrael5]

99% of users still use X, perhaps?

Because of slow development or lacking on implementation of newer and more reliable graphic compositors!?

[caligula]

Because of slow development or lacking on implementation of newer and more reliable graphic compositors!?

Probably there are various reasons, but most distros out there either start the GUI with startx or some *DM login greeter. They don't start Mir or Wayland. The previous compositors depend on X. Hardly anyone uses direct framebuffer without X.