Fedora 37 Looks Like It Will Proceed With Plan To Remove Legacy X.Org Drivers

Laid out earlier this month was a change proposal for removing legacy X.Org drivers with the Fedora 37 release later this year.

Adam Jackson of Red Hat proposed removing of the VESA and FBDEV X.Org drivers and the related support code from the X.Org Server that leads to those drivers being used. This is part of the long effort of transitioning Fedora and the broader Linux ecosystem to being more Wayland focused and with modern drivers.

FBDEV/VESA X.Org drivers are hardly maintained and effectively deprecated upstream. Paired with Fedora already supporting SimpleDRM and being at the forefront of including the latest open-source Linux graphics/display driver code, this is a rather comfortable plan and ideally should affect few users outside of maybe some niche use-cases.

It looks like this plan to remove legacy X.Org drivers will proceed! This FESCo ticket saw voting this week. As of writing there is already a solid +4 for voting and no votes against, so per FESCo rules, it looks like this will be approved without even going through the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting.

This week Adam Jackson also updated the change proposal with additional details for users concerned about being affected. See this page diff if you are concerned about any potential impact from the legacy driver removal.